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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CHRIST AND LIFE 



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CHaiST 

AND 
ROBERsT E. 5 PEER, 




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FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 



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Copyright, 1901, by 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 

(November) 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two CoHta ReceivEO 

NOV. 4 1901 

Copyright entry 

CLASS OU XXo. NO. 

COPY -J. 



• •••••• • •••«•» • 

; I t 1 



I 



? PREFACE 



The chapters which compose this Httle 
book appeared originally as articles in the 
religious papers. Twelve of them were 
published as a series in Forward; six as 
editorials in The Sunday School Times; 
three appeared in The Congregationalist, 
and the others in The Churchman and 
The Inter collegian. They are reprinted 
with the kind consent of the editors of 
these publications, and in the hope that 
the plain and simple views of Christian 
duty which they set forth may be helpful 
to some who are striving to subject their 
life wholly to Jesus Christ our Lord. 



CONTENTS 



HAPTE] 


R. 


PAGE 


I. 


Jesus Christ, Our Lord . 


9 


II. 


Religion not a Matter of Tempera- 






ment 


21 


III. 


The Place of Prayer 


29 


IV. 


The Study of the Bible . 


40 


V. 


A Christian's Standards' 


51 


VI. 


Christ's Reversal of Human Judg- 






ments ■ . 


60 


VII. 


Always and in All Things 


70 


VIII. 


The Publicity of the Secret Life . 


79 


IX. 


A Christian's Friends 


88 


X. 


The Nobility of Wrath . 


99 


XI. 


A Christian's Foes . . . . 


106 


XII. 


Christian Thinking 


116 


XIII. 


A Christian's Thoughts . 


127 


XIV. 


The Place and Power of Habits . 
7 


138 



Contents 



CHAP'l'KK 


PAGE 


XV. 


Christian Feeling . 


. 148 


XVI. 


The Selfishness of Sorrow . 


. 157 


XVII. 


Christian Activity . 


. 166 


XVIII. 


To Every Man His Work 


. 177 


XIX. 


How Christ Ranks Duties 


and 




Interests . . . . 


. 188 


XX. 


Christianity a Trust 


. 197 


XXI. 


Our Father God 


. 206 


XXII. 


The Holy Spirit 


. 216 


XXIII. 


Past and Future 


. 225 



Christ and Life 



JESUS CHRIST, OUR LORD 

We begin our Christian life by aban- 
doning ourselves to Christ. What we can 
not do for ourselves we find He can do 
for us. What we can not be in ourselves 
we find He can be in us. So we agree to 
let Him do for us and be in us what we 
can not do for ourselves, or be in our- 
selves. The principle that we thus rec- 
ognise and establish at the beginning of 
our Christian life is to be our principle 
to the end. Christ takes the place of 
self. At the beginning He destroys self 
in us that He may give self back to us in 
Himself. This was His promise : 
" Whosoever would save his life shall 
lose it : and whosoever shall lose his life 
for My sake shall find it." This is the 
9 



lo Christ and Life 

joy and surprise of our new life in Christ. 
He tells us to give up our life to Him. 
We give it, and lo, we receive it back 
again richer, better, more glorious. 

So it must be with us always. As we 
begin, we must go on, yielding all to 
Christ, recognising Christ as the owner 
of all. And as at the first, so always we 
shall discover that He will give us back, 
enriched and blessed, all that we have ac- 
knowledged as belonging not to our- 
selves, but to Him. 

So it is not contradictory to begin any 
discussion of the relation of our life to 
Christ, wath the statement that we are 
not to have any life of our own, and that, 
therefore, we must not have any concern 
about our life. We are to recognise, 
with all true Christians, that our life be- 
longs not to ourselves, but to Christ, in 
whom our life will belong to us more 
truly than ever before. This is the 
blessed mystery of yielding everything 
to Christ, — that we find that we have 
received everything back in Christ. This 
is the helpful lesson of surrender. 



Jesus Christ, Our Lord ii 

*' Laid on Thine altar, O my Lord divine, 
Accept this gift to-day, for Jesus' sake. 
I have no jewels to adorn Thy shrine, 

Nor any world-famed sacrifice to make; 
But here I bring within my trembling hand. 
This will of mine, a thing that seemeth 
small — 
And Thou alone, O Lord, canst understand 
How when I yield Thee this I yield mine 
all. 

" Hidden therein Thy searching gaze can see 
Struggles of passion, visions of delight ; 
All that I have, or am, or fain would be ; 
Deep loves, fond hopes, and longings in- 
finite ; 
It hath been wet with tears and dimm'd with 
sighs, 
Clenched in my grasp till beauty hath it 
none! 
Now from Thy footstool, where it vanquished 
lies, 
The prayer ascendeth — May Thy will be 
done ! 

" Take it, O Father, ere my courage fail, 
And merge it so in Thine own will, that 
e'en 
If in some desperate hour my cries prevail, 
And Thou give back my gift, it may have 
been 



12 Christ and Life 

So changed, so purified, so fair have grown, 
So one with Thee, so filled with peace di- 
vine, 
I may not know or feel it as mine own, 

But gaining back my will may find it 
Thine." 

Our personal life must rest firmly on 
this recognition of Jesus Christ as Lord 
of life. Each one must learn to say 
truthfully for himself, what Paul says 
for all : '' I am not my own. I belong 
to Christ." We do not know the real 
meaning or joy of life until we have said 
this. The very reality of life is that com- 
munity of living with some other life 
whose influence has worked upon us " as 
saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and 
all," which enables us to say, "I am 
tKine, beloved," and to hear in return, 
" Beloved, I am thine." ** My beloved is 
mine, and I am His," is the final secret of 
all things. This truth of the utter own- 
ership of Jesus is to be^the starting point 
and the goal of all true life among 
Christ's disciples, young and old. 

Two things become clear at once when 



Jesus Christ, Our Lord 13 

Jesus is thus recognised as proprietor of 
our personal hfe. One is that all that we 
have, life, time, talent, possession, is 
committed to us as a trust from Jesus, 
not to be used selfishly for ourselves, but 
unselfishly for Christ and for others. 
The other is that Jesus is our absolute 
Lord, our King, our unqualified Em- 
peror. It will be our zeal to exalt Him, 
to claim for Him first place in other lives, 
and to yield Him preeminence in our 
own. 

Now, many blessed consequences flow 
from this acknowledgment of the own- 
ership of Jesus. First of all, Jesus be- 
comes responsible for us, for our place in 
life, and for our conduct in life. He will 
be concerned to see that the life which He 
owns finds the place in which He wishes 
it to be. We perplex ourselves often 
about the will of God. " If I only knew 
what God wants me to do ! " we exclaim. 
But if we belong to Christ we may be 
sure that He is more anxious to have us in 
His place for us even than we can be to 
be there, and that He will get us into that 



14 Christ and Life 

place if He can. And Jesus becomes re- 
sponsible for our conduct also. What 
we do of evil or shame casts reproach on 
Him. The very thought of it makes a 
shameful or evil act intolerable. Jesus 
Himself in us puts forth all His" power 
to prevent what He disapproves. Our 
owner will cease to take care of His own 
only when we compel Him to do so by 
ceasing to be His own. Major Whittle 
used to tell of a negro slave who knew 
this secret and was wont to pray in the 
hour of temptation, " Massa, take cah ; 
yo' propehty is in dangeh ! " 

With the life that has yielded all to 
Jesus, Jesus shares all his life. This was 
what Jesus taught in the parable of the 
Good Shepherd. " I know Mine own, 
and Mine own know Me. My sheep fol- 
low Me, a stranger will they not follow, 
and I give unto them eternal life. And 
I lay down My life for the sheep." He 
asks no more than He gives ; that is, all 
of us for Himself, and all of Himself to 
us. Kingsley has retold, as true, a story 
of two monks of one of the earlier cen- 



Jesus Christ, Our Lord 15 

turies who Hved together in a cave for 
years in closest love. At last one sug- 
gested to the other that they should have 
a quarrel, after the way of the world. 

" How? " asked his friend. 

" Well, we'll take this stone and lay it 
down between us, and I will say, * This 
stone is mine ! ' And you can say, ' No ; 
this stone is mine ! ' and so we will quar- 
rel." 

So they placed the stone between them, 
and the first man said, " This stone is 
mine." The second man replied, hesi- 
tantly, '' I — I think — the stone is mine." 

" Well," replied the man who had pro- 
posed the quarrel, *' if the stone is thine, 
take it." 

Where two lives belong to each other, 
all that each possesses is the other's. 
When we say, " O Christ, I am Thine," 
He replies, " O friend, I am thine." Our 
personal life is the possession of Christ 
and of all that is Christ's. 

Jesus is like us in this particular, in the 
matter of His property — He likes to have 
it near Him. '' Father," He said in His 



1 6 Christ and Life 

great prayer, " I will that they also, 
whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me, 
where I am." This is the only time 
Jesus asserted His own will, and that will 
was that He and His own might never 
be separated. *' If any man serve me," 
He told His disciples, " let him follow 
me ; and where I am, there shall also My 
servant be." We do not do wrong in 
praying for His presence, but we cannot 
escape from His presence. Where we 
go. He goes. Where He is,, we are. And 
the secret of noble character is in this: 
** We all, with unveiled face reflecting as 
a mirror the glory of the Lord, are trans- 
formed into the same image from glory 
to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit." 
To associate with Him, as we must if 
we are His, is to come to resemble Him. 
Life becomes very simple and real 
under this conception of Christ's owner- 
ship. The problems of life cease to be 
impersonal questions of principle or duty. 
We do not ask any more, " What ought I 
to do? " We ask, " What would He have 
me do?" 



Jesus Christ, Our Lord 17 

" Evermore beside me on my way 
The unseen Christ doth move, 
That I may lean upon His arm and say, 
Dear Lord, dost Thou approve?" 

He is the present Lord of life, and 
waits to be asked regarding each de- 
tail, and is ready with certain guid- 
ance and help. As the *' Act of 
Faith " declares, " I believe on the name 
of the Son of God. Therefore, I am in 
Him, having redemption through His 
blood and life by His Spirit. And He is 
in me, and all fullness is in Him. To 
Him I belong by purchase, conquest, and 
self-surrender; to me He belongs for 
all my hourly needs. There is no diffi- 
culty inward or outward that He is not 
ready to meet in me to-day. The Lord 
is my keeper. Amen." 

But it is not alone our personal life in 
its relation to Christ that is affected by 
His lordship over us. Belonging to 
Christ, we sustain a new relationship to 
all who are Christ's. Among all who 
are sons of God in Christ Jesus, Paul 
says, " There can be neither Jew nor 



1 8 Christ and Life 

Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, 
there can be no male and female : for ye 
are all one man in Christ Jesus." Dr. 
Arthur Mitchell illustrated this truth of 
the union of a man with his fellows be- 
cause united with Christ, when as a boy 
in Williams College he resigned, at his 
conversion, from the secret society of 
which he was a member. As a friend 
wrote, '' The tie was ' artificial,* he said, 
and weakened the broader one of human- 
ity." He belonged now to Christ, and 
he would not cheapen that tie with all 
who were Christ's by establishing any 
other '* artificial " tie. He was Christ's 
and all of his relationships must be 
Christ's also. 

As Lord of our life Jesus must be Lord 
of all that is in our life. Of course, He 
must be recognised as Lord over all that 
appears to others and by which they form 
their judgment of us. Over all outer 
acts, habits, and words, Jesus must be 
admittedly and openly Master. And 
surely over all that is within He must be 



Jesus Christ, Our Lord 19 

Lord. That would be a pitiful hypocrisy 
which proclaimed Him Lord over the 
outer life and kept the real life within 
from His sovereign control. Thoughts, 
feelings, tastes, imaginations, longings, 
ideals, judgments — all these are to be 
under the rule of Christ. Yet His bond- 
age is perfect liberty and life. Only as 
we put on His chains are we free. He 
delivers us from the lower slavery to the 
emancipated life. 

This is the first truth of all, that we are 
not our own, but Christ's. The whole 
life of the Christian rests on this, and if 
we will not assent to it, we can not go on 
to discover and possess the treasures of 
the life that is deep and true. We can 
not trul^ rest anywhere else ; for Christ's 
we are, whether we admit it or not. It is 
simply a question whether we will rec- 
ognise His ownership with love and loy- 
alty, or live in insurrection and faithless- 
ness. Let us begin by joyfully admit- 
ting, as our blessed and absolute Lord, 
Him who redeemed us, not with corrupti- 



!20 Christ and Life 

ble things, such as silver and gold, but 
with His own precious blood. A rich, 
personal Christian life begins in this con- 
fession, made in full and sincere surren- 
der, " Jesus Christ, my Lord." 



II 



RELIGION NOT A MATTER OF 
TEMPERAMENT 

There are many people who are of the 
opinion that they do not possess the re- 
ligious temperament. Some deplore this. 
Religion, with its life and moods, its opin- 
ions and experiences, is a difficult thing to 
them. They are discouraged at its diffi- 
culty, and blame themselves for their lack 
of a spiritual disposition. Or they excuse 
themselves for the shortcomings of which 
they are sensible by the reflection that 
something is wanting in their nature. 
There are others who do not deplore their 
want, but rather exult in it. It is a matter 
of pride to them that they do not feel the 
sense of reverence, which they call su- 
persition, or the sense of dependence, 
which they call fear. 

Among earnest Christians, even, this 

21 



22 Christ and Life 

sense of subjection to the Hmitations of 
disposition is constantly found. Says 
one, '* I wish I could enjoy the peace and 
blessing of the deeper Christian experi- 
ence. I have tried to gain them, but it 
is not my temperament." Says another, 
" I try to love the Saviour, but I am not 
emotional, and my imagination . will not 
help me, and I can not feel that He is 
with me. I wish I could experience the 
thrills of devotion which some seem to 
feel, but I can not." '* I do my duty as 
duty," says a third, " but that is all. I 
work for Christ as His servant, not His 
friend." 

And even where the heart and mind 
seem just fitted for divine fellowship 
and the whole experience and service of 
religion, there are times when, through 
physical weariness or sickness or distrac- 
tion, the religious disposition suffers col- 
lapse, and the heart sighs with disap- 
pointment, '' H only my feelings were 
steady and safe from distress, and could 
rest always peacefully in Christ ! " 

Now all this habit of thought, so com- 



Religion not Temperamental 23 

men and so natural, proceeds upon the 
mistaken supposition that reUgion is a 
matter of the disposition. It is not so. 
Many a man of spiritual temperament 
is in prison for crime, and many a man 
of dull and sluggish religious disposition 
is in the kingdom of God. A Hindu so- 
called " prince" has been in America re- 
cently, raismg money for the declared 
purpose of providing wells for the 
Pariahs in the Madras Presidency. He 
has received thousands of dollars from 
devoted people who have been impressed 
with his noble religious earnestness. Re- 
ligion seemed so natural in him as to 
raise him above suspicion. But he was 
an unworthy and irreligious man. A 
temperament which made religious pro- 
testation easy to him covered over what 
was essentially irreligious and dis- 
honest. 

Perhaps worship and devotion are easy 
to us. Perhaps they are difficult. It 
matters comparatively little to Christ. 
What He esteems is not our disposition, 
but our will. If the will is vicious or 



24 Christ and Life 

untamed or selfish, smoothness or tear- 
fulness of disposition are but repugnant 
to Him. If the will is true and sincere, 
and bent toward His obedience, even 
a rough and unemotional temperament 
will not dismay Him. It is easier work- 
ing through the will to alter the disposi- 
tion than working through the disposition 
to alter the will. 

Jesus lays His emphasis, accordingly, 
elsewhere than on the temperament: 
" If any man willeth to do His will, he 
shall know of the teaching whether it be 
of God." It is not a matter of natural 
disposition, but of volition, of deliberate 
choice. We do not come to faith by any 
emotional fitness for it, but by the will of 
obedience. If faith resided in the emo- 
tional disposition, doubt would reside 
there too. But Jesus will not allow 
either. 

" For Thou art so far that I often doubt, 
As I stretch forth my hands in prayer. 
Searching within and looking without, 
If Thou art anywhere. 



Religion not Temperamental 25 

" But He said that they who did His word 
The truth of it should know, 
I will try to do it. If He be Lord, 
Perhaps the old spring will flow. 

" Perhaps the old spirit wind will blow 
That He promised to the^r prayer; 
And, doing Thy will, I yet may know 
Thee, Father, everywhere." 

So, also, in His new commandment, 
Jesus does not hang everything upon the 
inclination to love. He bids the disciples 
to love. Love, like faith, is not a caprice 
of disposition. It is an attitude of will, 
personality melted into service. 

Our dispositions cannot hurt our wills. 
" There is no evil," says Kant, " but the 
evil will." But our wills can hurt or help 
our dispositions. If we will to love, we 
shall become loving. If we will to treat 
tenderly, we shall become tender. If 
our walls are false and dishonorable, no 
matter how even and fair our disposition, 
it must become corroded by the evil 
power within. And if our wills are right, 
our passions and affections and moods 
will become right also. 



26 Christ and Life 

It makes a great deal of difference 
whether our rehgion is a rehgion of the 
disposition or a religion of the will. If 
the former, it will have its ups and 
downs ; if the latter, neither variableness 
nor shadow of turning. Our moods 
change from day to day, but the eternal 
realities of the infinite love and life are 
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 
And the will of trust, of faith, of obedi- 
ence, once set toward them, is unalter- 
ably kept by the will of God in steadfast- 
ness and serenity. 

Jesus gives less heed, accordingly, to 
the emotional instincts, the tempera- 
mental moods of men, than to the under- 
lying cast of character and bent of will. 
If these are right, He who regenerates 
the will can regenerate the disposition 
also. In one of his great sermons Bush- 
nell shows this, — how '* Christ Regen- 
erates even the Desires," the positive 
cravings, the wild wishes, the vagrant 
longings, new-molding them in their 
spring, and configuring them inwardly to 
God, regenerating the soul at this deepest 



Religion not Temperamental 27 

and most hidden point of character. This 
is a real renewal of the will. 

No privilege of the spiritual life is 
denied to any of us because of our dis- 
position. " That good part " was Mary's, 
not because her temperament differed 
from Martha's, but because she chose it. 
God's invitations are exceeding broad, 
as broad as the choices, not as narrow as 
the caprices of men. " Whosoever shall 
call upon the name of the Lord shall be 
saved." '' Whosoever liveth and believeth 
in Me shall never die.'' " Whosoever be- 
lieveth that Jesus is the Christ, is born 
of God.'' '' He that is athirst let him 
come ; and whosoever will, let him take 
the water of life freely." No tem- 
peramental limitations narrow the gates 
of the kingdom or hedge the way to per- 
fect ^satisfaction of the deepest thirst of 
the soul. 

And, finally, duty cannot be stated in 
'terms of temperamental religion. All 
that that sort of religion has to say is, 
*'l feel like it," or, ''I don't feel like 
it." But duty is above the disposition to 



28 Christ and Life 

do it. It speaks with an authority that 
will not endure the whims of mood. It 
has its roots in the will of God, and its 
flower in the will of God's child. Each 
of us can find in it full poise of spirit and 
calm of heart, whatever our tempera- 
ment mav be. 



Ill 

THE PLACE OF PRAYER 

There are some practices of the Chris- 
tian Hfe which, all agree, are indispens- 
able. Whenever anyone thinks or speaks 
of the maintenance of the spiritual life 
these exercises stand out prominently. 
Prayer is one of them. It is a part of all 
public worship. Its place is always rec- 
ognised. Yet, as a simple matter of fact, 
it is one of the most neglected things in 
the Church and in the life of Christians. 
There are perhaps not a few of us who 
talk more about prayer than we pray. 
This would be less true if we believed 
more in the reality of prayer and were 
willing to go to school to learn how to 
pray. 

No one can read the Bible without rec- 
ognising that the Bible regards prayer as 
a real power. '' Whatsoever ye shall 
ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," 
29 



30 Christ and Life 

says Jesus. " The prayer of faith shall 
save the sick," says James, and adds, 
" EHjah was a man of like passions with 
us, and he prayed fervently that it might 
not rain ; and it rained not on the earth 
for three years and six months. And he 
prayed again ; and the heaven gave rain, 
and the earth brought forth her fruit." 
James v:i5, 17, 18. "And this is the 
boldness which we have toward Him," 
wrote John, *' that, if we ask anything ac- 
cording to His will. He heareth us : and 
if we know that He heareth us whatso- 
ever we ask, we know that we have the 
petition which we have asked of Him." 
I John v: 14, 15. '' Prayer is," as Austin 
Phelps says, " a power, has a power, not 
subjective merely. So any unperverted 
mind will conceive of the scriptural idea 
of prayer as that of one of the most 
downright, sturdy realities of the uni- 
verse. Right in the heart of God's plan 
of government it is lodged as a power. 
Amidst the conflicts which are going on 
in the evolution of that plan it stands as 
a power. Into all the intricacies of di- 



The Place of Prayer 3 1 

vine working and the mysteries of divine 
decrees it reaches out silently as a power. 
In the mind of God, we may be assured, 
the conception of prayer is no fiction, 
whatever men may think of it." 

Perhaps when we first became Chris- 
tians we felt this. God did seem to be 
listening then, and we believed we were 
in His presence. But as we went on the 
glory died away, and we seemed to be but 
speaking aimlessly into the air. But 
neither were we mistaken in our glad 
new faithi nor has God changed. 

" Not through Thy fault, O Holy One, we lose 
Thee." 

We have simply failed to go on from our 
first lessons to the new lessons required 
for an enlarging life. 

For prayer is as much a matter of 
schooling as Bible study or other spiritual 
growth. The disciples knew that it was 
not a chance thing, but an education ; and 
they came to Jesus, saying, '' Lord, teach 
us to pray." We may be sure both from 
what we know of Him, and what we see 



32 Christ and Life 

in their later hves, that Jesus began the 
class and taught them as He is willing 
now to teach us, if we wish to learn. 

The first thing is to enter truly Christ's 
school ; that is, the school in which He is 
the Teacher and where the scholars learn 
of Him. Look at His life and ways of 
prayer. He prayed without ceasing. He 
prepared for the crises and duties of life 
by prayer. The great events of His life 
and the outgoings of power were preceded 
by prayer. The people connected His 
prayers with helpful influences and 
brought little children to Him '' that He 
should lay His hands on them, and pray." 
Matt, xix: 13. The choice of the Twelve 
and the Sermon on the Mount were pre- 
ceded by a night of prayer. Luke vi : 12, 
13. The transfiguration was a phenome- 
non of prayer. Luke ix : 28-36. 

Such prayers of anticipation are com- 
mon. Facing a great crisis, men turn in- 
stinctively to a power without themselves, 
desiring help against the hour of need. 
When the crisis is past, they lean once 
more contentedly upon their own strength 



The Place of Prayer ^3 

and discernment. Jesus, however, fol- 
lowed the great events of His life by 
prayer, and the sorrows of His life were 
met in prayer. 

Much of His prayer was for others 
than Himself. Such was His confidence 
in His prayers that He even gave thanks 
publicly for God's goodness in hearing 
Him before any answer had come. John 
xi: 41, 42. His prayers were as simple, 
too, as those of a child (Matt, xi: 25-27; 
John xi : 41, 42 ; Luke xxiii : 34, 46), and 
as submissive, wholly free from all self- 
will and pride. Matt, xi: 26; 26: 39, 

42,54. 

The busier He was the more earnestly 
He seems to have given Himself to prayer 
(Mark i : 35 ; Luke iv : 42 ; John vi : 15) ; 
but He was ready at any time to forego 
for the sake of service the privilege of 
silence and communion which He so 
greatly prized. Matt, xiv : 14. 

And all this prayer life of Jesus was 
so natural and true. God was not a God 
afar off to Him. We never hear Him 
addressing God as " Almighty God," a 



34 Christ and Life 

phrase found in the New Testament only 
in the book of The Revelation. He al- 
ways calls Him Father, and speaks to 
Him as to one who is near at hand. In 
the midst of a crowd He talks to Him as 
naturally as in solitude. Matt, xi : 25, 26 ; 
John xii : 27 ; Luke xxiii : 46. 

Now of course Jesus was such a man 
of prayer, not just to set us an example 
of a life of prayer, but because He was 
Himself. Y€t He was Himself that we 
might be like Him, and we can not be in 
His school and not learn from Him to 
pray as He prayed. But looking at Him 
will not in itself accomplish this educa- 
tion. We must practice what we see in 
Him, and one of the best places to begin 
this is in intercessory prayer. '' Simon, 
Simon," He told Peter, " behold, Satan 
asked to have you, that he might sift you 
as wheat ; but I made supplication for 
thee, that thy faith fail not." Jesus knew 
that the evil one would try the little band 
of apostles. He knew that Simon was 
in danger of failing, and He made His 
knowledge of Simon's peril and need a 



The Place of Prayer 35 

ground for loving prayer in his behalf. 
Now we often perceive the need and peril 
of others. Sometimes we make their 
stumbling an occasion of sneers and 
merriment or contemptuous disdain. 
Why not rather make it an occasion of 
prayer? We see people displaying bad 
taste in dress or unconscious of some un- 
pleasant defect. To look at these things 
uncharitably is an offense against the 
rights of our own spirits, to which we 
owe the discipline of noble and generous 
judgment. " Unless we pray for others," 
says Doctor Trumbull, " we are lacking 
in that spirit in which alone we can pray 
hopefully for ourselves, and we are liv- 
ing in neglect of a prime duty to God's 
dear ones who need and deserve our 
prayers." 

It is easy to be unconscious of the time 
spent in school, but it is not possible to 
be schooled without time, or to live with- 
out school. All life is discipline. And 
the discipline of prayer takes time. It 
will come faster and more richly to us as 
we give time consciously for it. Jesus 



36 Christ and Life 

gave time evenings (Mark vi : 45-47), 
mornings (]\Iark i: 35), and whole 
nights. Luke vi : 12. Apart from His set 
times, there was no time not filled with 
the spirit and instant possibility of 
prayer. He never drifted into the mood 
nor went to a place where He could not 
congenially face the Father with open 
eyes and an open heart. Is this true with 
us? 

We shall doubtless require years to 
learn to pray for long seasons. A deeper 
Icnowledge of our own needs, a greater 
sense of the goodness of God, a broader 
sympathy with the trials and the sorrows 
of others, are necessary for this. But we 
must begin now with set times. If you 
have to go through a tunnel to your busi- 
ness, or across a ferry, or past a certain 
place daily, associate these times with a 
word of prayer. Pause often in reading 
or writing or at your work, in the office, 
on the farm, in the house, to look up and 
say, " Dear Father." Begin the day if 
you can with a quiet time. As Channing 
has said : *' The hour is a still one. The 



The Place of Prayer 37 

hurry and tumults of life are not begun, 
and we naturally share in the tranquillity 
round us. Having for so many hours lost 
our hold on the world, we can banish it 
more easily from the mind, and worship 
with less divided attention. This then is 
a favorable time for approaching the Au- 
thor of our being, for strengthening the 
intimacy of our minds with Him, for 
thinking upon a future life and for seek- 
ing those spiritual aids which we need in 
the labors and temptations of every day. 
In the morning there is much to feed the 
spirit of devotion " — the change which 
God has produced, the goodness which 
He shows to us, seen in our re-creation by 
sleep, the anticipations of a new day. 
" Our early prayers will help to shed an 
odor of piety through the whole life. 
God, having first occupied, will more 
easily recur to, our mind. Our first step 
will be in the right path and we may hope 
a happy issue. If our circumstances will 
allow the privilege, it is a bad sign when 
no part of the morning is spent in prayer. 
If God finds no place in our minds at that 



38 Christ and Life 

early and peaceful hour he will hardly 
recur to us in the tumults of life. Let a 
part of the morning, if possible, be set 
apart to devotion ; and to this end we 
should fix the hour of rising, so that we 
may have an early hour at our disposal. 
Our piety is suspicious if we can renounce, 
as too many do, the pleasures and benefits 
of early prayer rather than forego the 
senseless indulgence of unnecessary 
sleep." 

In this sweet and holy fellowship rever- 
ence must not destroy familiarity nor 
familiarity diminish reverence. He who 
is God is also Abba, Father. As I heard 
a quaint Italian say reverently once, " My 
Papa in heaven." Who dare deny to the 
child's heart the child's name for its 
Father? Above all else our relations to 
Him must be real, tender, sweet. It is 
the formalism, the artificiality, the unreal- 
ity, of our attitude toward Him that kills 
most of our prayers. Is He our Father? 
Then let us speak to Him so. Let us 
enter into His loving confidence with 
open and ingenuous will. 



The Place of Prayer 39 

Lord, what a change within us one short hour 
Spent in Thy presence will prevail to make ! 
What heavy burdens from our bosoms take, 
What parched grounds refresh as with a 

shower ! 
We kneel and all around us seems to lower; 
We rise and all the distant and the near 
Stands forth in sunny outline, brave and 

clear 
We kneel how weak, we rise how full of 

power. 
Why therefore should we do ourselves this 

wrong. 
Or others, that we are not always strong, 
That we are ever overborne with care, 
That we should ever weak or heartless be. 
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, 
And joy and strength and courage are with 

Thee?" 



IV 
THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 

It is easy to forget that we are not our 
own, but Christ's, and to act as though we 
were our own masters. We need to culti- 
vate the habit of recognising Jesus as 
Lord, in every act and judgment. How 
may we do this? And even when we 
mean to remember that we belong to 
Christ and mean to serve Him with 
faithfulness, we are dissatisfied with our 
own weakness and inefficiency. How 
may we become efficient and strong? 
And although we may sometimes be sen- 
sible that we have some real power in 
doing Christ's work, we are conscious 
that there is a walk quite possible to us of 
more constant fellowship and might. 
How may we come into this for our- 
selves ? 

These are but a few of the many ques- 
40 



The Study of the Bible 41 

tions that arise in the Christian's personal 
Hfe. One good answer to them all is 
found in the experience of Jeremiah: 
" Thy words were found, and I did eat 
them ; and Thy words were unto me a joy 
and the rejoicing of mine heart; for I am 
called by Thy name, O Lord God of 
hosts." The words of God brought joy 
and the vivid reminder of the ownership 
of the Lord. 

This is just what Bible study does for 
the Christian Hfe. There was nothing 
which the statutes and word of God did 
for the Psalmist, as repeatedly set forth 
in the One Hundred and Nineteenth 
Psalm, that our richer Bible will not do 
for us ; and in proportion as our desire 
for a true and real life is sincere and ear- 
nest will our study of the Bible be zealous 
and constant. It is God's written mes- 
sage to us, and we can not truly live 
without it. As Jesus said to the tempter, 
" Man shall not live by bread alone, but 
by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." 

Each one of us must study the Bible 



42 Christ and Life 

for himself. No one else can do our 
work for us. The methods of others 
will help us to perfect our methods, but 
each of us must work out for himself his 
own method of study. Every man gath- 
ered his own manna in the wilderness, and 
the good Shepherd calleth each of His 
sheep by name separately and leadeth 
them out. No man can do another man's 
studying for him. Each one must be will- 
ing to take time for himself; and Bible 
study should have our best time, and 
enough time. The fag ends of the day 
should not be the only time for it. 
" Study the Bible," Mr. Ruskin said, 
" making it your first daily business to 
understand some portion of it, and then 
your business the rest of the day to obey 
what you do understand." " Every morn- 
ing," said Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Jus- 
tice under Charles the Second, " read 
seriously and reverently a portion of the 
Holy Scripture and acquaint yourself 
with the doctrine thereof." 

If we can get it, a little morning time 
should be given to the Bible. The day 



The Study of the Bible 43 

should begin with a word of God that will 
echo through all its hours. And the time 
we give to the Bible should be ample time 
as well as good time. Now and then a 
whole day should be spent on it, and 
sometimes a whole vacation. Nothing 
else is so well worth while. As Canon 
Liddon said : " What do we read and 
leave unread ? What time do we give to 
the Bible? No other book, let us be sure, 
can equally avail to prepare us for that 
which lies before us. . . . Looking 
back from that world, how shall we desire 
to have made the most of our best guide 
to it! How shall we grudge the hours 
we have wasted on any — be they thoughts 
or books or teachers, which only belong 
to the things of time ! " He is a very 
foolish Christian who spends so much 
time on newspapers as to leave none for 
his Bible. It is better to '' be a man of 
this one Book," as John Wesley said he 
wished to be, than of all other books. 

All of us have quite enough tempta- 
tions to meet to prevent real Bible study 
from becoming too easy. " I do not have 



44 Christ and Life 

time ; " ''I have so much else to do ; " 
" It is not interesting ; " " I do not know 
how '/' " 1 can't get into it ; — " these are 
some of the innumerable whispers of the 
tempter. We want to go to bed in the 
evening, and do not want to rise early. 
We have enough to do through the day. 
There is no time left for the Bible! To 
meet all these difficulties, the Bible study 
that is to feed and sustain our personal 
Christian life must be determined and un- 
flinching, and carried on, not superficially 
and spasmodically, but with persistent 
and definite purpose. We must lay our 
plans of study and execute them; and in 
them we must have that " humility and 
singleness of heart " recommended by 
John Locke, which makes us, as we study, 
say, like Samuel, with open mind and 
will, " Speak, Lord ; for Thy servant 
heareth." 

Such Bible study as the Christian must 
do to nourish and expand his personal 
life will not do itself. After time has 
been set aside for it, and the right spirit 
has been won, practical, effective plans 



The Study of the Bible 45 

must be pursued. Mere indiscriminate, 
miscellaneous, unordered dipping in here 
and there will not suffice. Solid, sensible 
method is required. Ezekiel's vision was 
of life within wheels. It combined the 
spirit of life and the ordered movement 
of wheels. It is easy for us to lose a great 
deal through an indefensible prejudice 
against methods and rules in our spiritual 
life. 

One good plan is to read the Bible 
through in course, frequently. This was 
the method which John Quincy Adams 
recommended : " The first and almost the 
only book deserving of universal attention 
is the Bible ; the Bible is the book of all 
others to be read at all ages and in all 
conditions of human life, not to be read 
once or twice through, and then laid aside, 
but to be read in small portions of one 
or two chapters every day, and never to be 
intermitted, except by some overruling 
necessity. I speak as a man of the world 
to men of the world, and I say to you, 
* Search the Scriptures.' " 

There are eleven hundred and eighty- 



46 Christ and Life 

nine chapters in the Bible. Reading two 
chapters each day, save Sunday, and 
eleven on Sunday, will carry one through 
the whole book in a year. Reading the 
Bible through over and over again in this 
way lodges it unconsciously in the mem- 
ory. And it is worth while deliberately 
to commit to memory large sections of it. 
If young Christians neglect to do this, 
they will lose, and the Church will lose, 
and the world will lose. Nothing is so 
powerful to purify and strengthen as the 
Bible in the memory, *' learned by heart," 
as our good phrase puts it. Mr. Ruskin 
has left on record his loving gratitude to 
his mother for having compelled him to 
learn the whole body of the fine old 
Scotch paraphrases of the Psalms. Many 
other men look back with deepest love 
and longing to Sunday evenmgs long ago, 
when, at a father's or a mother's knee, 
they recited the Scriptures they had been 
set to learn. It is a blessed thing when 
that can be said of our homes which Paul 
said of the home of Timothy, who had 
been taught his Bible '' from a babe." 



The Study of the Bible 47 

A yet simpler form of Bible study is 
to memorize verses and meditate upon 
them. We have scores of spare moments 
during the day, while dressing and un- 
dressing, going from place to place, to and 
from meals, passing from duty to duty, 
when our minds as a rule are adrift, no- 
where. Fill these times with verses from 
the Bible. Carry a pocket Testament 
or cut up an old Bible and carry pieces in 
your pocket. Have a Silent Comforter 
or other Scripture roll in your bedroom. 
Not every Bible verse will have a mes- 
sage for you, perhaps, but there is not 
one without some meaning. Even the 
lists of names in Chronicles one old ladv 
learned once, because she " would feel 
dreadfully ashamed to meet those people 
in heaven and not know their names." 
Mrs. Slosson tells in '* Seven Dreamers " 
of another old lady whose favorite verse 
was, " At Michmash he hath laid up his 
carriages." The Bible is the richest, full- 
est book in the world, and will fit even 
the most peculiar mind. 

But neither of these plans supersedes 



48 Christ and Life 

the necessity of studying the Bible by 
books. The Bible is a little library of 
sixty-six books, with many writers, writ- 
ten in different lands and times. All the 
books can best be understood by under- 
standing each book. We need to study 
the questions w^hich Bible scholars deal 
with under the head of " Introduction." 
Who wrote this book? When? Why? 
What is he teaching ? What is his special 
message and purpose? These inquiries 
will help to reveal what the book has to 
say to our own hearts and to this present 
world, because we shall have learned 
what the author had to say to the hearts 
and the world of his time. Doctor 
Broadus used to advise the study in this 
way, first of the Gospels, then of The 
Acts, Romans, Timothy, Psalms, Deu- 
teronomy, and Isaiah. 

Another profitable method of study is 
by subjects, either by truths, like faith, 
the love of God, obedience, prayer, the 
Lord's return ; or by characters. Christ's 
comes first. Make a list of all the beauti- 
ful things you can see in Him, of all the 
wonderful things He said about Himself. 



The Study of the Bible 49 

See if you can find anything that He said 
about Himself that was not lowly. Study 
His example as a man of prayer, as a stu- 
dent of His Bible, as a revelation of 
what God would have each of us to be. 
What was Christ that I am not, and that 
I ought to be? What am I that Christ 
was not, and that I ought not to be? 
Study Paul as a teacher, as a personal 
worker, as a friend, as a correspondent, 
as a missionary. Ferret out the noble 
lives and characters of Andrew, Philip, 
Barnabas, John, Timothy, Apollos, 
Aquila, and Priscilla. These should be 
our friends and companions, even now. 
It is for our sakes that their lives are re- 
corded in the Book that can not be de- 
stroyed. 

But no method of study can accomplish 
its true purpose for us that does not keep 
uppermost always the thought of the 
Bible as God's personal message to our 
own heart and will. Each truth that we 
perceive is a truth to be incorporated in 
character. What we learn, we must be. 
Knowledge about the Bible is poor and 
imperfect if it does not bear fruit in a 



50 Christ and Life 

life of loving, joyful service of man and 
of the Son of man. 

Our very Bible study, accordingly, 
must be a ministry. What we get, we 
must give. Meditating over what we 
read, until it becomes a part of us, we 
are to pass it on from us to others. '' The 
man who has a faith," says ^lazzini, " is 
bound to witness for it every hour of the 
day." Make your Bible study and what 
you are learning in it the subject of your 
conversation, and speak of the beauty of 
the Saviour you are coming increasingly 
to admire and adore. 

And last, be often alone with your 
Bible. The Saviour will speak sweetly 
to you from it, if you will give Him time 
for confidence. The Bible, too, will do 
something for you in these times. As 
Izaak Walton quaintly says: — 

" Every hour 
I read you kills a sin 
Or lets a virtue in 
To fight against it." 

And in the Psalmist's words, 

** Great peace have they which love Thy law ; 
And they have none occasion of stumbling." 



A CHRISTIAN'S STANDARDS 

Both Christians and those who are not 
Christians fall easily into the fallacy of 
assuming that what they think right is 
right. I once overheard a young man 
and a young woman on a railroad train 
discussing the question of bicycle riding 
on Sunday. The young woman had taken 
the higher ground and was getting much 
the better of the argument. At last the 
young man tried to dismiss the question 
by saying, *' Well, of course, if you think 
it is wrong, it would be wrong for you; 
but I can't see any harm in it, and if I 
can't, it isn't wrong for me to do it." 
Many young men justify themselves in 
betting or drinking or smoking, on the 
same ground. 

But all this merely indicates that think- 
ing so or not thinking so settles noth- 
51 



52 Christ and Life 

ing. Something objective, outside our 
whim and caprice, must constitute the 
settling thing. The fact that a man thinks 
Themistocles was ostracized in 470 b. c. 
is of no consequence, no matter how hard 
and positively he thinks so. He was 
ostracised in 471 b. c, and no amount of 
thinking or not thinking can affect the 
matter. And so in other things. A rail- 
road signalman sets red lights. Thinking 
them yellow or green does not make theixi 
so. The company would laugh at an 
•engineer who thought that his idea about 
it and not the thing itself was the con- 
clusive element, and would dismiss him 
right promptly. 

Let us think, however, of conduct and 
morals. It is equally true there that a 
man's appeal to his standards settles noth- 
ing. The question is, are his standards 
right? No man has a right to live be- 
low his standards ; moreover, he may not 
have a right to live as low as his stand- 
ards. A man's thoughts about what he 
can freely do may enable him to do what 
he has no right whatever to descend to. 



A Christian's Standards 53 

He may think it is right for him to do 
wrong. What is right or wrong, true or 
false, is right or wrong, true or false, ir- 
respective of what you and I think about 
it. 

You may say that Paul says, " To him 
that thinketh anything to be uncleanj to 
him it is unclean." But he says '' un- 
clean," not '' clean." It is negative, not 
positive. He declares, not that it is right 
for any man to do whatever he thinks 
right, but that it is wrong for him to do 
what he thinks is wrong. It is a counsel 
of caution — if there is doubt about it, 
don't do it. If you think a thing is un- 
clean, you may not touch it, but it does 
not follow that if you think it is clean 
you may. " The hour cometh," said Jesus 
to His disciples, " that whosoever killeth 
you shall think that he offereth service 
unto God." Is murder therefore justi- 
fiable? 

Well, but men ask, " Can anyone do 
more than act conscientiously ? " Yes, he 
can make sure that his moral judgments 
are right. Conscience only tells us that 



54 Christ and Life 

there is right and wrong. It does not 
tell us what is right and what wrong. 
Our moral judgment tells us that, and it 
is capable of education and enlightenment, 
and of discovering those eternal objective 
standards of right and wrong which exist 
in God and are borne in upon our mind 
and will in the gospel. Our business as 
Christians is not only to do what we be- 
lieve to be right but to be sure that our 
beliefs conform to the eternal law of 
righteousness in God. 

We who know or can know what this 
is are to be judged and held responsible 
according to our conformity to these ob- 
jective, unchangeable standards, not ac- 
cording to our thoughts about them. 
Where men do not know and can not 
know that polygamy is wrong, God will 
judge them accordingly; but he will not 
judge us in the same way no matter how 
conscientiously we might believe polyg- 
amy to be right. And we are bou^d to 
find out these standards of God. We can 
not say, " We did not know them. We 
lived according to our standards." In 



A Christian's Standards 55 

this country ignorance of the law is no 
excuse. If a man kills game out of sea- 
son in ignorance, or commits arson and 
pleads that he did not know that it was 
illegal to burn a man's house down, the 
law does not let him off. The laws of the 
land are published, and all men are sup- 
posed to know them. This was God's 
ordinance in Israel. " If any one sin and 
do any of the things which the Lord hath 
commanded not to be done; though he 
knew it not, yet is he guilty, and shall 
bear his iniquity." You may think a fire 
will not burn, but put your hand in it and 
your thought about it will not save you 
a blistered finger. It is so in morals. God 
has His laws ; if we break them, they are 
broken and we must reap the conse- 
quences. Those laws are there, soUd, 
eternal, untouched by any of our vagaries, 
shufflings, or argumentations. 

Everv one of us needs to remember 
this. The Christian life that forgets it 
will soon show the weakening effects of 
its forgetfulness. To keep life true and 
clean we need its fiber and reliabilities, 



56 Christ and Life 

its veracities, as Carlyle would say. These 
are in the will of our holy God, and not 
in our human moods and caprices. 

Some men's standards are shaped by 
their own appetites. Some men are weak 
and of flabby judgment. Some are mor- 
ally color-blind. " The lamp of thy body 
is thine eye; when thine eye is single, 
thy whole body also is full of light; but 
when it is evil, thy body also is full of 
darkness. Look therefore whether the 
light that is in thee be not darkness." 
Luke xi: 34, 35. 

Doctor Trumbull has told in one of his 
sermons of a most remarkable case of 
moral color-blindness. '' The Rev. Dr. 
Nathan Strong, pastor of my old home 
church in Hartford, was, as I have been 
told, the owner of a distillery, while in 
the active pastorate. Not being so suc- 
cessful a distiller as he was a pastor, he 
failed in the rum business, and a civil 
judgment was rendered against him ac- 
cordingly. To evade the sheriff's execu- 
tion, he was compelled to shut himself in 
the parsonage week days for a series of 



A Christian's Standards 57 

weeks; but when Sundays came, he 
moved out in solemn dignity, with his 
cocked hat and knee breeches, and passed 
across to the church to preach the gospel 
as usual. No civil process would disturb 
him on Sundays. His conscience does not 
seem to have disturbed him, on the dis- 
tillery question, any day of the week. 
There are churches still standing," says 
Doctor Trumbull, " here in New England, 
which were built with the proceeds of 
lotteries duly authorised for that sacred 
purpose." 

" If our consciences," he adds, " work 
differently from the consciences of our 
fathers on these points, it is because our 
moral eyesight has been trained to finer 
distinctions in color, under the treatment 
of those whom God has set to be spiritual 
oculists." Paul found in his later life 
how wrong he had been in his earlier 
course, and bitterly condemned himself. 
" I verily thought with myself [at that 
time]," he said later, ''that I ought to 
do many things contrary to the name of 
Jesus of Nazareth." 



58 Christ and Life 

This may sound hard. We like to think 
of the sweet and gentle side of the Chris- 
tian life. But this is alone healthful and 
safe. The loving grace of God is not 
meant to conceal the holy will of God. 
The Christian life is not sweet feeling 
only. It is iron righteousness. To tell 
people to go ahead and do whatever cor- 
responds to their standards, without tak- 
ing pains to see whether their standards 
are right, is fatal. It will not save a man 
who has done the fatal thing to plead that 
his moral sight was defective, if he had 
ample opportunity to correct that defect. 
The color-blindness of the engineer who 
has mistaken a red danger signal for a 
yellow safety light, and runs his train- 
load of passengers into an abyss, will not 
save the lives of the poor creatures hurled 
to their doom, or his own life, either. 

So in morals, too. A man may lie, 
thinking a lie is sometimes justifiable, but 
he is a liar nevertheless ; and, unfortu- 
nately, the book of The Revelation makes 
no distinction between justifiable lies and 
the other kind, but declares unequivocally, 



A Christian's Standards 59 

" But for . . . all liars, their part shall 
be in the lake that burneth." 

No, there are objective standards in 
God, firm and absolute, and the strong 
and admirable life is the life that is keen 
to respond to this, that sees the new light 
which shines on the duties of a Christian 
seeking for it, that girds itself for the 
highest and most exacting attainment, 
and draws conduct resolutely up to it, 
that does not say, '' I would rather ; " 
" That is so hard." The fact that other 
men do this or do that proves nothing 
whatever as to my course. He is the 
splendid man who sees the high and stain- 
less will of God for human life, who 
stands serene and immovable on the rock 
of Christ's clear revelation of the right. 
and who wills to do the thing that is 
eternally true. 



VI 

CHRIST'S REVERSAL OF HUMAN 
JUDGMENTS 

Some of the judgments of men Jesus 
came to reaffirm and complete. He said 
He had come, not to destroy the law and 
the prophets, but to fulfil. He removed 
none of the moral ordinances of God. He 
poured fresh vital power into them. 
Herein lay one surprise and service of 
His coming. But some judgments of men 
He came to annul and reverse. In this 
lay another surprise and service of His 
coming. Both Jesus' affirmations of the 
judgments of God and His reversals of 
the judgments of men entered into His 
mission. 

Christ's collisions with human judg- 
ments gave infinite zest and variety to His 
work. They lifted it above all monotone. 
He did not come to reduce everything 
60 



Reversal of Human Judgments 6i 

to a dead level. The prophecy that His 
era would be the day of the straightened 
paths and filled valleys and the humbled 
hills was not more a prophecy that a 
smooth way should be opened than a dec- 
laration of the overturning mission of 
Jesus. He would make valleys of men's 
hills, and hills of men's valleys. This was 
His mother's song of gladness to God : 

*' He hath put down princes from their thrones, 
And hath exalted them of low degree. 
The hungry He hath filled with good things, 
And the rich He hath sent empty away." 

Jesus threw Himself athwart the current 
sentiments and manners of men. All who 
met Him testified that He was not like 
other men. His speech was not their 
speech. His acts were not their acts. His 
judgments were not their judgments. 

It was a startling thing when this 
young Galilean peasant rose up fearlessly 
to shatter the conventional assumptions 
and moral subterfuges of His day. This 
was the burden of His great discourse 
which we call the Sermon on the Mount. 



6a Christ and Life 

'' You interpret the command not to kill 
as satisfied if you have not actually taken 
life. But I call wrong anger and contempt 
murderous, and liable to judgment as 
such. You regard a man as innocent of 
adultery who iias not been guilty of the 
act. I hold the thought of it criminal. You 
are careful of veracity in oaths, but I say, 
Swear no oaths, but be true always. You 
believe in the law of retaliation. I de- 
nounce it. You enjoin love of friend and 
hate of foe. I scorn such atheism. God's 
sons must bear their Father's generous 
heart. You holy people are adepts at 
mock humility and public piety. But 
thou, when thou fastest, anoint thy 
head and wash thy face, that thou be 
not seen of men to fast. You pile up 
wealth on earth. The moth and rust cor- 
rupt it, and the thieves steal it. Cease 
such folly, and be rich in God." Is it 
strange that, when He ended these revo- 
lutionary words, " the multitudes were 
astonished at His teaching ; for He taught 
them as one having authority, and not as 
their scribes ? " And was it not most 



Reversal of Human Judgments 6^ 

natural, as He went on with His mission, 
assailing tradition after tradition, demol- 
ishing hypocrisy after hypocrisy, and nul-} 
lifying judgment after judgment, that 
men of evil hearts should be angered, and 
that, forced to choose between His death 
and His views, they should prefer killing 
Jesus on a cross to killing the sin in their 
own hearts, that were shut against Him 
and His truth? For the reversed judg- 
ments of Jesus demand reversed wills in 
men. 

Jesus once answered the Pharisees, 
when they scoffed at Him for His condem- 
nation of mammon service, by declaring, 
" That which is exalted among men is an 
abomination in the sight of God." How 
could He do otherwise, therefore, as the 
Son of God, who knew His Father's mind 
than overturn the views of men? This 
was what He set Himself to do among 
His disciples. First of all He reversed 
their judgments as to the comparative 
importance of inner and outer. He re- 
peatedly condemned before them the 
settled habit of mind of the Pharisees, 



64 Christ and Life 

who cleansed the outside of the cup and 
platter, while their inward part was full 
of extortion and wickedness, and who 
lodged the guilt of sin in the overt act 
and condoned the covert lust. And He 
pressed on His disciples, when alone, the 
supreme importance of pure fountains 
within, assuring them that the overflow- 
ing streams would care for themselves. 
Men laid the emphasis on conduct or cere- 
mony. Jesus laid it on character. 

Likewise He set cause above effect. 
Men do not. They are content to keep 
themselves clean of gross acts, though 
heedless of the inner shapings of taste 
or evil, which mean gross acts in time. 
In social and political life we are ever 
dealing with the consequences of forces, 
and overlooking the forces themselves. 
We do this with poverty, with intemper- 
ance, with political abuses. Reformers try 
to abolish the evil by attacking its mani- 
festations, but the evil is deeper than the 
phenomena in which it expresses itself. 
Distributing food to the needy, limiting 
liquor licenses, introducing civil-service 



Reversal of Human Judgments 65 

reform, are proper procedures, but they 
do not go deep enough. Jesus leaped past 
all these things. He said nothing about 
slavery, about the inferiority of woman, 
about intemperance, about gambling; but 
He did set up principles which went 
straight to the causes of these evils, and 
there can be no ownership of man, no 
abuse of woman, no prostitution of life, 
no dishonesty of gain, where men obey 
Him. Jesus' influence has been the 
mightiest reformatory influence in the 
world, because He reversed the judg- 
ments of men as to the method of reform. 
And He explicitly contradicted the 
judgments of men as to the comparative 
importance of higher and lower. '* The 
kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship 
over them, and they that exercise author- 
ity upon them are called benefactors. But 
ye shall not be so, but he that is greatest 
among you, let him be as the younger; 
and he that is chief, as he that doth 
serve. For whether is greater, he that 
sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is 
not he that sitteth at meat? But I am 



66 Christ and Life 

among you as he that serveth." Ever 
since Jesus said this, His standard of 
measurement has been gaining accept- 
ance in the world, and the lowly man is 
great because Christ has overturned the 
judgments of men in this regard. 

Jesus found a world that did not believe 
in human equality. He has been destroy- 
ing its disbelief. He found a world that 
did not believe in human unity. He has 
been welding the race into one. He found 
a world that despised toil. *' A mechanic's 
occupation is degrading," said Cicero. 
*' A workshop is incompatible with any- 
thing noble." He took up a trade, and 
worked at a bench. Aristotle character- 
ised women as beings of a lower kind, 
while Plato made it a mark of civil dis- 
organisation that women should be on an 
equality with their husbands. Jesus drew 
no distinction between man and woman, 
and has deliberately reversed human 
judgment as to the subserviency of 
woman. He entered a world that had lost 
faith in goodness. " All things," wrote 
Seneca, '' are full of iniquity and vice.'* 



Reversal of Human Judgments 67 

Jesus refused to abandon faith in man, 
even when man was doing his utmost to 
discredit such faith. He reversed man's 
judgment of his own failure. He found a 
world that had lost joy in the present life^ 
and abandoned hope for the life to come. 
" The aim of all philosophy," said Seneca, 
" is to despise life." *' What folly it is 
to renew life after death ! " exclaimed 
PHny. " You rob me of man's greatest 
good — death." Jesus smote such pessi- 
mism and despair with the jubilant radi- 
ance of His own glorious life and love. In 
all these things He affronted and reversed 
the judgments of men. He was the first 
of the men '' who have turned the world 
upside down." But the whole revolution 
is His. 

Sometimes Jesus reversed human judg- 
ments by the mere silent influence of His 
presence, as when the woman taken in sin 
was brought to Him, and He stooped 
down and wrote on the sand. The scribes 
and Pharisees had thought it would be a 
fine thing to drag the woman into Jesus' 
presence with their loathsome tale. He 



68 Christ and Life 

spoke but one general word, and stooped 
down again and wrote, and then the affair 
ceased to appear such a fine thing to the 
men whom the presence of Jesus con- 
victed of shame and sin and hypocrisy. 
There is a world of revolutionary power 
still in the presence of Jesus. A thousand 
things shrivel into their true paltriness 
when the blaze of His countenance falls 
on them. Take your judgments there, 
and see how many of them He will re- 
verse by the mere influence of His silence 
and His sinless purity. 

For Christ is full still of reversing 
power. He is not dead. He ever liveth, 
and in each human life, and in the life of 
humanity, He is working His overturn- 
ings. All righteousness is the product 
of His influence. He is the source of all 
scorn of the sins the world loves, and of 
all love of the virtues the world hates. 
And that profound change which the New 
Testament calls repentance, or change of 
mind, is merely the acceptance of the re- 
versals of Jesus. We alter our judgments 
to correspond with His. We transpose 



Reversal of Human Judgments 69 

our antipodes and nadir. The " despised 
and rejected of men " becomes our adored 
sovereign and Lord, and, like Paul, we 
preach the faith that once we destroyed. 
We exchange the far country for our 
Father's house, and the judgments of that 
evil land yield to the contrary judgments 
of Him who brought us thence and hither. 



VII 
ALWAYS AND IN ALL THINGS 

Of the events of the last Monday of 
our Lord's hfe two only are recorded 
for us, the withering of the fig-tree and 
the cleansing of the temple. Doubtless 
there was much else, both of act and of 
word, on the part of our Saviour which 
was of greatest significance, but these two 
things alone are saved to the Church. 
And yet these two are enough, for they 
contain tw^o great moral principles which 
sweep up and down and to and fro across 
the whole life of man. 

These two principles are embodied in 
the very features of Jesus' conduct which 
seem most arbitrary. It is often so, and 
must be so. The standards of Christ's 
life and action were not the standards of 
ours. They sharply collided with ours. 
When our eyes are opened we perceive 
70 



Always and In All Things 71 

that ours are wrong, and His right; but 
until then it is tolerably certain that just 
those elements in His doctrine or behavior 
which are most characteristic, most illu- 
minating, most veracious, will give us 
most trouble and seem most strange to us. 
He withered and slew a fig-tree that 
was bearing no figs at a season when 
figs were not to be expected. The spirit 
of cavilling has denounced this act. The 
fig-tree, men say, was but acting accord- 
ing to its nature, in bearing no fruit 
in the spring. If Jesus' conduct had been 
only the outcome of personal hunger 
and disappointment, it would have been 
unworthy, but no miracle of His ever had 
a simple personal import. In the Temp- 
tation He refused to work any miracle 
for personal ends ; and at the last, when 
He might have summoned ten legions of 
angels. He quietly submitted to the death 
of the cross and the taunts of the people, 
'' He saved others. Himself He can not 
save." And in this case the miracle was 
not wrought out of pique and petulance. 
Such thoughts never entered the mind of 



72 Christ and Life 

any one who understood Christ. The 
miracle was a parable in action. It was 
a lesson of judgment on life. The Jewish 
nation was bearing leaves and no fruit. 
The time had not come, men said, for 
the Messiah and for human recognition 
of Him. The season for figs was afar 
off. Jesus taught by the sharp lesson of 
the fig-tree that in the moral life the 
season for figs is always here, that recog- 
nition of spiritual opportunity and com- 
pliance with moral principle are not post- 
ponable. 

This lesson of '' always " in the spirit- 
ual life and in the moral world is a neces- 
sary lesson. We are habitual delinquents. 
We justify our fruitlessness on the 
ground that we are sowing seed, and that 
the harvest time has not come. For 
years, generations, and centuries the seed 
has been sown in human life before us, 
and yet we are saying, " The time of figs 
has not come." " Say not ye," replies 
Jesus, " there are four months and then 
cometh harvest? Lift up your eyes and 
look, behold the fields are white already 



Always and In All Things 73 

to the harvest." Every man is to be bear- 
ing fruit daily. The season of figs is al- 
ways. 

And, further, in the matter of moral 
principle, we are constantly discovering 
pretexts for postponement or exception. 
'' This is not just the opportunity," we 
say. " It is not a felicitous time," or, 
" This set of circumstances is surely novel 
and calls for our waiving for the present 
the application of our normal moral con- 
victions." And so many men go trim- 
ming and compromising through life, 
always finding some reason for bearing 
leaves alone and no fruit. " Gather them 
together and cast them into the fire," the 
Lord of the vineyard will say at the last. 

The man who isn't " always," is in 
danger of being " never." He schools 
himself into a character of evasion. The 
only sure way of being ever right is to 
resolve to be always right. And after all, 
principles are only principles when they 
are solidly sure. Rules have their excep- 
tions, but not principles. There are 
times when law and ordinances may and 



74 Christ and Life 

must be overridden or held in abeyance 
or superseded by some higher law or or- 
dinance. But a principle has no such al- 
ternating life. It is always. 

The other event of this day in Jesus' 
life fortified and enlarged this teaching 
of His from the figless tree. He went 
into the temple and cast out them that 
sold and them that bought in the temple, 
and overthrew the tables of the money- 
changers and the seats of them that sold 
the doves. That was all right. He was 
destroying vested interests, to be sure, 
but vested interest in wrong-doing was 
not regarded by Jesus in the same defer- 
ential way in which many modern men 
regard vested interest in the liquor traffic, 
gambling, and prostitution. He swept all 
the mass of trade and haggling barter out 
of the house of His Father, and told the 
multitude why He did it. " Is it not 
written, ' My house shall be called a house 
of prayer for all the nations ? ' but ye 
have made it a den of robbers." Now 
that was all right, and doubtless the 
public opinion of a great section of the 



Always and In All Things 75 

people supported Jesus in His course to 
this point. 

But Jesus did not stop here. '' And He 
would not suffer that any man should 
carry a vessel through the temple." That 
was fanaticism, men say. He was an ex- 
tremist. Why could He not stop at some 
reasonable moderation? If this were a 
present-day transaction we can under- 
stand how the moderate men would ar- 
gue. " Now/' they would say, '' you have 
driven out the money-changers and the 
tradesmen, you have established your 
principle. Don't press matters to an ex- 
treme. Carrying vessels through the 
temple is not a wicked thing. Show your- 
self a fair and moderate man by not press- 
ing your principle too far." That is the 
way with men. But it was not Jesus' 
way. The fact that the matter was com- 
paratively trivial and innocent did not 
alter the fact that it was unallowable 
and wrong, and the Lord of inexor- 
able righteousness, of the rectitude that 
never swerved, refused to surrender the 
victory He had gained in great things by 



76 Christ and Life 

abandoning the very same principle when 
presented in small things. 

A principle is a principle always and 
in all things. No lie is so tiny as to 
cease being a lie, and the wrong of it 
does not consist in its dimension, but in 
its existence under any dimension. The 
same power that makes Jesus able to save 
from the smallest sin constitutes His 
power to save from the greatest sin, and 
all the power and quality which are requi- 
site in the one who will save from gross 
sin, are necessary in Him who will save 
from insignificant sin. It is the sin from 
which we are to be saved, not its size. 
And no sin is insignificant. Nor is any 
principle which is the antinomy of sin. 

Now these truths of the last Monday 
of the Saviour's life are vital truths for 
our Christianity. We are saying con- 
stantly that the conditions are not ripe for 
a spiritual awakening, or that we expect 
they will be ripe some months ahead, or 
that we are not qualified for personal 
work, but hope some day to be. The 
Lord withered these falsehoods when He 



Always and In All Things 77 

withered the fig-tree. Or we say that 
when we have more time we will study 
our Bibles and cultivate the devotional 
life, or will develop those capacities with- 
out which the Christian life is an im- 
perfect and joyless thing. We forget that 
the time of figs is always, and that the 
Lord will endure in the world of men 
none adorned merely with leaves. 

Or men say that their gambling is not 
such a dreadful thing. " It is only for 
trifles or for a little money, or the limit 
is low, and no one loses who can't aflFord 
it." What would be wrong in the large 
is innocent in the small. Or in the com- 
mon intercourse of life, men urge, little 
deceptions, even lies, are neccessary, 
though they admit that a great lie would 
be wrong, or even a little one if told 
with insufficient motive. But water is 
wet whether in the ocean or in the drop. 
And a lie is a lie whether it is a metre 
long or a millimetre. The Lord will have 
no buying and selling in the temple. 
Neither will He have any carrying of any 
vessels through it. 



78 Christ and Life 

The very despair and disintegration of 
Hfe consists in opening up our principles 
to interminable exceptions. Let us have 
done with it. Let our principles be solid 
and unyielding. Our sympathies and af- 
fections for men are to be rich and kindly, 
but there is no excuse for treason to 
principle at any time or in any circum- 
stance. God has given us always all suf- 
ficiency in all things in His grace. Let 
us give Him always in all sufficiency and 
in all things the; answer of clear and un- 
wavering hearts, which repose unshaken 
in a rectitude of life as rigid as the rocks. 



VIII 

THE PUBLICITY OF THE SECRET 
LIFE 

Man guards the privacy of his per- 
sonality with jealous care. He will not 
allow it to be too deeply invaded. Some 
points of contact with life he allows of 
necessity, but he will not tolerate any 
unveiling of his secret nature. He finds 
a great comfort in this. However much 
men may see, there is an inner life which 
they cannot see, which is his alone. No 
eye can penetrate therein. There he sits 
alone with the secrets that are beyond 
speech and scrutiny. This is our view. 

Christ calls this view a foolish 
blunder. Men, indeed, may not be able 
to see beyond the outer walls of the hu- 
man spirit, but in reality, Jesus declares, 
there is no such thing as privacy and 
solitude for it. As He met men He was 
79 



8o Christ and Life 

not blocked in his analysis of them by 
any barred doors. He saw their inner- 
most springs of thought and motive. He 
needed no testimony borne to the true na- 
ture of any man, for He himself knew 
what was in man. And the power which 
He possessed while here He suggested 
was a permanent attribute of the Father. 
His vision is of the secret things. " Thy 
Father which seeth in secret," He called 
Him. 

And, although men can hide them- 
selves from one another now, and im- 
agine that for the secrets buried in their 
spirits there is neither publicity here nor 
resurrection hereafter, Jesus taught that, 
as no secret is complete enough to be se- 
cret from God now, so none is so complete 
as to be shut always to men. The universe 
is one day to watch the utter and naked 
exposure of every human spirit. " There 
is nothing covered, that shall not be re- 
vealed, and hid, that shall not be known." 
The full horror of this burst later on the 
Apostle Paul : " We must all be made 
manifest before the judgment-seat of 



The Publicity of the Secret Life 8 1 

Christ, that each one may receive the 
things done in the body, according to 
what he hath done, whether it be good or 
bad." Can any cheek be so hardened as 
not to blaze with shame then before the 
calm, steady eye of the innumerable mul- 
titude looking on the mass of evil imagi- 
nations, uncleannesses, unkindlinesses, 
which were kept back from the view of 
men in life, but are now bare for the 
pity of the redeemed and the scorn of 
the lost ? 

All the hidden things of Hfe will be 
public to all eyes, then, as they are pub- 
lic now to the eyes of God. Ezekiel re- 
cords in the eighth chapter of his 
prophecy his startling introduction to 
this unillusionment of God. No pre- 
tense of external propriety blinded God's 
vision. What men were seeing was to 
Him of less than no consequence. What 
men could not see riveted His gaze. 
Nothing concerned Him but the secrets 
of men. 

And this is the great truth. What 
we deem our most secret things, shared 



82 Christ and Life 

by none, are the pubHc knowledge of 
God, and of others than God. " A cloud 
of witnesses " is watching us, partici- 
pants in the undeceivableness of God 
and looking with Him, not as man 
looketh, on the outward appearance, but 
on the secrets of the heart. Those whose 
judgments we should most prize, who 
have gone before us and are with God. 
free now from the limitations which sur- 
round the knowledge of men and confine 
it to what we grant it, see now what we 
do in the dark, every man in his chamber 
of imagery. 

The gospel declares the abolition of 
secrecy. *' No man saw me do it," says 
the sinner. " It was only a thought. I 
would not dare to express it. I did not 
express it. No one knows that I cher- 
ished it." " It was only a desire. I have 
not done the thing. No one knows." " I 
did it in the dark. It will never be 
found out." Not so. No public act of 
our lives ever was so open or under »uch 
universal observation. What do the un- 
seen spectators care for the drama of our 



The Publicity of the Secret Life 83 

acts? They watch the battle ground of 
the inner life. When once evil has con- 
quered there, the evil act will follow in its 
course. We may be sure that it is pre- 
cisely that part of our life which we 
deem secret, and in which, therefore, we 
tolerate what we could not endure that 
men should see, that interests God and 
the unseen witnesses. They see most 
clearly and watch most acutely what we 
think we have hidden from all sight. 

We forget this because we are exter- 
nalists. Our emphasis is on the outer be- 
haviour. '* Do the right things " is our 
rule. Christ's emphasis is on the inner 
life, the secret place. Guilt there is 
guilt before, or in the absence of, any 
consequent act. " Ye have heard that 
it was said. Thou shalt not commit adult- 
ery: but I say unto you, that every one 
that looketh on a woman to lust after her 
hath committed adultery with her al- 
ready in his heart." And purification 
must begin in the inner spirit. " Woe 
unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypo- 
cites! for ve cleanse the outside of the 



84 Christ and Life 

cup and of the platter, but within they 
are full of extortion and excess. 
Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first the in- 
side of the cup and of the platter, that 
the outside thereof may become clean 
also." *' Be right within " is Christ's 
rule. This alone is character, for " char- 
acter," as Mr. Moody used to say in one 
of his favourite quotations " is what a 
man is in the dark." The only way to 
make sure always of having nothing to 
conceal or be ashamed of in our outer life 
is to have nothing demanding conceal- 
ment or fearing publicity in the life that 
is dark and unknown to men, but ablaze 
with the light of the scrutinies of the 
unseen world. 

And, after all, less is secret than we 
suppose even here among men. What is 
cherished in the secret chambers of the 
imagery is shaping temper and will and 
impulse and taste. Before we know it, 
almost, what we thought was secret has 
betrayed itself, or has so corrupted us 
that the very desire for its secrecy has 
decayed. The only safe and noble course 



The Publicity of the Secret Life 8 J 

is so to live and think and feel as to fear 
as little the eyes that watch our hearts 
as the eyes that watch the ways of our 
outer life. '' To keep clear of conceal- 
ment," said Phillips Brooks, '' to keep 
clear of the need of concealment, to do 
nothing which he might not do out on 
the middle of Boston Common at noon- 
day — I can not say how more and more 
that seems to me to be the glory of a 
young man's life. It is an awful hour 
when the first necessity of hiding any- 
thing comes. The whole life is differ- 
ent henceforth. When there are ques- 
tions to be feared, and eyes to be avoided, 
and subjects which must not be touched, 
then the bloom of life is gone. Put off 
that day as long as possible. Put it off 
forever, if you can." So surely as there 
is anything needing to be concealed, said 
Jesus, will it be impossible to conceal it. 
" Whatsoever ye have said in the dark- 
ness shall be heard in the light; and 
what ye have spoken in the ear in the 
inner chambers shall be proclaimed upon 
the housetops." 



86 Christ and Life 

It is of man's self-deceivableness that 
on one side he thinks he can conceal what 
is inevitably open, and on the other 
regards as dark and hidden the very 
things which God has made plain and 
clear. The simple message of Jesus was 
an enigma to the wise and understand- 
ing. They knew too much to know. The 
gospel was veiled in them ; the god of 
this world, who had persuaded them; 
that their secrets were hid, had blinded 
their minds so that God's open news was 
darkness to them. 

Very sweet it is to remember that this 
truth has its other side. The world, 
looking at what it sees, pronounces one 
man good, when, in God's sight, he is 
diseased and corroded and unclean, and 
this is horror. But the world, looking at 
what it sees, condemns another man, 
while God sees in him the struggle 
against the sin that besets him, the bitter 
loathing of it, the helpless trust of the 
heart in the mercy of the Saviour, the 
sense of failure and defeat, the humility 
and weariness of utter abasement. He 



The Publicity of the Secret Life 87 

hears the cry of the soul for the strength 
of the Spirit, and with that which the 
world has not seen and heard, the Father 
is well pleased. 

* * O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known 
me, . . . 

Thou understandest my thought afar off, . . . 

And art acquainted with all my ways. 

For there is not a word in my tongue, 

But, lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it alto- 
gether. . . . 

The darkness and the light are both alike to 
Thee. . . . 

Search me, O God, and know my heart: 

Try me, and know my thoughts : 

And see if there be any way of wickedness in 
me, 

And lead me in the way everlasting." 



IX 
A CHRISTIAN'S FRIENDS 

Every life must have its affections and 
its antagonisms. We are made for loving 
and for hating. We can not escape from 
desires and attachments, or from dislikes 
and repugnances. Let us think now only 
of the former and the place they must fill 
in the Christian life. There is a place for 
them in life which must be filled. Men 
may deny this. They may dislike society, 
but in that case they like solitude. They 
may avoid friendships, but in that case 
they seek friendlessness. They may not 
like conversation or books, but some con- 
trary taste will of necessity come in in- 
stead. All of us have our tastes, our at- 
tachments, our friends. We must have 
them. We can only choose what they 
shall be. 

No choice can be more important. 
88 



A Christian's Friends 89 

What we are is largely the product of the 
influences that have played upon us and 
shaped us. As we look back over our life 
we can trace in it the changes produced 
from without by our friends . of what- 
soever sort. We can mark the work of 
some book that came into our life, at a 
time when we were just plastic for it, 
and left its ineffaceable imprint. We can 
see when a certain new taste came to birth 
and once born in turn gave birth to a 
score of new insights and outreaches. We 
can recall when a new truth, hidden from 
us before, suddenly burst upon us and 
became our friend, and at once began in 
us a work of transformation and noble 
growth. And above all, we can remember 
the very day, perhaps, when we caught 
for the first time the light in human eyes, 
and felt the slow warmth or the sudden 
leap of heart within that told us a new 
friend had come. What boundless bless- 
ings that friendship has brought to us 
since ! 

In our deepest life nothing is more im- 
portant than our friends. The essence of 



90 Christ and Life 

the truest Christian life is a friendship 
with Jesus. '* No longer," He said, " do 
I call you servants ; for the servant know- 
eth not what his lord doeth: but I have 
called you friends; for all things that I 
heard from My Father I have made 
known unto you." And our whole life 
will be rich and full and strong and 
worthy when filled wnth such friends as 
the great Friend will approve, and such 
friendships as spring up naturally and 
irresistibly out of His perfect love. 

With friends and friendships like these, 
the absence of other things is unnoticed. 
" When Socrates," wrote Dr. Samuel 
Johnson, " was building himself a home 
at Athens, being asked by one that ob- 
served the littleness of the design, why a 
man so eminent would not have an abode 
more suitable to his dignity, he replied 
* that he should think himself sufficiently 
accommodated if he could see that nar- 
row^ habitation filled with real friends.' " 
The friendless king, with treasures and 
palace, is poor and pitiable in comparison 
with his lowly subject who loves and is 



A Christian's Friends 91 

loved by friends who trust him and who 
desire his trust. 

" Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, 
That/ a stalled ox and hatred therewith." 

The true wealth and joy of life is in 
friends. With true friendships there is 
no room for discontent. Our Christian 
life can lack nothing, can be only a rich, 
sweet, pure' content when realised as a 
living friendship with the Saviour. 

" Since Jesus is my friend, 
And I to Him belong, 
It matters not what foes intend, 
However fierce and strong." 

But besides the friendship of Jesus, life 
is full of human friendships, or ought to 
be. Jesus the Friend is the real fountain 
and guarantee of human friendship. And 
the friendships that Jesus fosters have the 
character of the perfect friendship that 
He offers. They are abiding. That is their 
first characteristic. No friendship that is 
not abiding will find a place in the true 
Christian life, for the reason that no re- 



92 Christ and Life 

lationship that is temporary or transient 
can be a friendship. This is not the 
world's view. *' Whilst you are prosper- 
ous," says Ovid, '' you can remember 
many friends ; but when the storm comes, 
you are left alone." " Friendship," says 
Cato, " ought not to be unripped, but un- 
stitched." But these are neither friends 
nor friendships. One might as well speak 
of dry water or a cold fire as of a broken 
friendship. The Lord loved enduringly. 
Let us be like Him in this. When our 
ideals of friendship-love disintegrate and 
we allow ourselves to speak of it as a 
passing or feeble thing, liable to destruc- 
tion by any act or word, one of the best 
elements in the Christian life is destroyed, 
namely, the will to love in spite of love- 
lessness. That is what makes the divine 
love so holy and wonderful. 

For it is selfishness that mars friend- 
ship. We cherish our friendships for 
what they are to us, rather than for what 
we may be in them, and so, naturally, 
when we cease to get out of them what 
we counted on in the original bargain, we 



A Christian's Friends 93 

drop them in disgust. But the true Chris- 
tian Hfe will hold its friendships in higher 
esteem. It will enter them only with the 
will to give help and do good, and so it 
will not be disappointed when it is shown 
that help is needed and that there is room 
for doing good. 

Among our friends there should be 
some lowly lives. It is not good that all 
of any man's friends should be on the 
same social plane with himself or on a 
higher social plane. Some should be 
lower. It might be enough to point to 
Jesus' example. Though He was the Son 
of God, He stooped to share the food of 
fishermen, and to make publicans His 
friends. But apart from the duty of 
Christlike service, we lose much by hav- 
ing no friends among the poor. There 
are experiences which only the poor pos- 
sess, and they have visions and simplici- 
ties and sympathies which it is one of the 
greatest privileges "of life to share. The 
true Christian life requires genuine and 
equal friendships with those who have 
less of some things than we have, and as 



94 Christ and Life 

compensation, at the even hands of the 
good God, of other things have more. It 
is the regret of one of the most famous 
boys' schools in this land that it draws 
its boys exclusively from one social class, 
and therefore lacks the fibre and tone 
which poor boys would provide. There 
is another great school which supplies 
scholarships for needy boys and makes 
room for them on the ground that the 
school could not do its work without them, 
or shape character and will, as it aims 
to do in all its boys, without the help of 
an element in the school only to be found 
in the presence of boys of scanty means, 
but brave, strong-hearted, and conscious 
of the manliness of sacrifice and toil. 

Those men and women, and boys and 
girls, are to be pitied who can not easily 
make friendships of this sort ; who are too 
priggish to fit into them, or too blind to 
see their joy and help. And no one of us, 
however humble and lowly, need miss the 
help and joy. There is always some one 
a little lower down whom we can help, 



A Christian's Friends 95 

and helping find that we have gained a 
hundredfold more than we gave. 

We are to have other friends than per- 
sons. There is spiritual help and round- 
ness of mind and heart in a love for 
nature, " the art of God," for trees and 
brooks and the blue beauty of the sky; 
for birds and the little things that God 
has made. St. Francis, the legend says, 
so loved the creatures that they felt his 
love and came to him. It is good for a 
Christian to have through all his life a 
child's heart of tender pity for the little 
things. 

Among books, too, we are to make 
friendships. It is both right and proper 
to read many books, but it is wrong not 
to form special friendships with a few. 
We must make our own choices, but that 
heart has missed something which has not 
a little circle of intimate friends, loved 
perhaps by others also, but yet its 
own particular and sole friends. Get if 
you can some books of rich association 
and history. I have a copy of Thomas 



96 Christ and Life 

Fuller's " Good Thoughts " which was 
carried during the war by a dear friend, 
and which sank in the sea with an army 
transport, in seventy fathoms, lay there 
three months, and was subsequently re- 
covered. It is rebound now, but its pages 
show the water stains, especially the page 
on which occur the words of the good old 
preacher, '' Music is sweetest near or over 
rivers, where the echo thereof is best re- 
bounded by the waters." Of course, we 
make friends with the Bible, and have 
one copy of it, surely, that is familiar 
and responsive to our touch, and that 
knows our ways and will open to what 
we love best. 

In the great range of truth, also, it is 
good for a Christian while trying to reach 
and love all, to have some few great 
truths especially familiar and precious to 
him — friends, as it were, that will come to 
him in his free hours and linger with him, 
comforting and strengthening and quick- 
ening him. The love of Christ, the will 
of God, the care of the Father, the lesson 
of the Cross, the power of the Resurrec- 



A Christian's Friends 97 

tion, — these are true friends. In the early 
Church we find the apostles making much 
of the truth of Christ's second coming. 
Jesus had made much of it. It was tied 
indissolubly to the Lord's Supper — '* as 
often as ye eat this bread, and drink this 
cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till He 
come." Paul loved it, and hoped that 
others would. He was to receive his 
crown of righteousness at that day, and 
not he only, but all those also that love 
Christ's appearing. It is good for the 
heart to have friends like these among 
the great truths of life, and to possess 
the blessing of their companionship and 
transfiguring might. 

If our friends were only for life here it 
would yet be worth our while to seek 
them ; but they are not for this life only. 
Whether for weal or woe, we make them 
for eternity. Thus Whately writes : " As 
we have seen those who have been loving 
playmates in childhood grow up, if they 
grow up with good, truth-like disposi- 
tions, into still closer friendship in riper 
years, so also It is probable that when this. 



98 Christ and Life 

our state of childhood shall be perfected, 
in the maturity of a better world, the like 
attachments will continue between those 
companions who have trod together the 
Christian path to glory, and have taken 
sweet counsel together and walked in the 
house of God as friends." 



X 

THE NOBILITY OF WRATH 

" And He looked round about on them 
with anger, being grieved at the hardening 
of their heart." This is what Mark says 
of the Saviour, who was meek and lowly 
in heart, and who, as a lamb before His 
shearers is dumb, opened not His mouth. 
The Lord of love was angry. Can it be 
possible ? Mark's word for " anger " can 
not be explained away. It is the regular 
New Testament word for anger or wrath. 
And why should one try to explain it 
away ? Right wrath is no less noble than 
love. Each necessitates the other. Christ's 
loving ofifer of health on the Sabbath is 
followed by His anger at human faithless- 
ness, and His stern rebuke of Pharisaic 
hyprocrisy precedes His tender appeal to 
the city which would not recognise her 
King. One day He stood as Master in 
the temple, with blazing eyes and a whip 
L.ofC. 99 



loo Christ and Life 

of cords in His hand, driving out the men 
who made His Father's house a place of 
merchandise and a den of thieves, and 
the next He is led as a lamb to the 
slaughter, and opens not His mouth. 

Our Lord's very love of purity necessi- 
tated a hatred of the knowledge of sin, 
and His love of holiness a hatred of sin 
itself. His positive affection for the good 
involved a positive detestation of the evil. 
And by so much as His heart was tender 
toward the things that were worthy and 
pure, was it unavoidably hard toward all 
that was low and unlovely and wrong. 

Wrath is noble because it is necessary. 
We can not maintain ourselves in a world 
of sin by a mere neglect of its evil while 
we seek its good. The struggle toward 
what we seek involves a struggle from 
what we shun. It is the evil of the world 
that furnishes us with footing for our 
ascent. 

" We rise by the things that are under our feet, 
By what we have mastered of good and of 

gain, 
By the pride deposed and the passions slain, 

And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet." 



The Nobility of Wrath loi 

The life that is a mere struggle against 
sin is in danger of being a mere yictim 
to sin. But the life that is' not a struggle 
against sin at all is in equal datnger of 
missing its end. " Be not overcome of 
evil " is Paul's counsel of conflict. 
" How ? " we ask. " Overcome evil with 
good." ** Draw nigh to God," James en- 
joins. "How?" we ask. "Resist the 
devil." 

An attempt to escape from human evil 
by ignoring it, or denying its existence, 
or cultivating a mere passive interest in it, 
is dangerous. The safer course is to hate 
it. That is the purpose of its existence 
so far as the Christian is concerned, — to 
supply a legitimate object of his wrath. 
One part of the mission of Christ may be 
described in these terms : " I came not to 
send peace, but a sword, ... to set a man 
at variance." In the heart of God Him- 
self we find such hatred beside His in- 
finite love. The same disciple who speaks 
of the love that gave Jesus to die speaks 
also of " the fierceness of the wrath of al- 
mighty God," — the same God of whom 
the prophet said that He was of " purer 



I02 Christ and Life 

eyes than to behold iniquity," and who 
" can not look on sin with any degree of 
allowance." 

There are times in the life of man, and 
of each man, when this truth needs to be 
revived. The human spirit slips into 
moderatism, into frivolity, into softness 
of moral judgment. At such times we 
need to learn afresh from our Lord the 
nobility of wrath. It was with some rec- 
ognition of this that Newman wrote the 
extreme words in his " Apologia " : "I 
do not shrink from uttering my firm con- 
viction that it would be a gain to the 
country were it vastly more superstitious, 
more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce, 
in its religion, than at present it shows 
itself to be." The Psalmist felt this, and 
cried : 

" Hot indignation hath taken hold upon me, 
Because of the wicked that forsake Thy law." 

Such noble wrath is a fountain of great 
power and of great joy. *' Luther said 
that he never did anything well t^ll his 
Avrath was excited, and then he could do 



The Nobility of Wrath 103 

anyching well." And Paul was a splen- 
did illustration of this. His mighty soul 
reared against sophistries and falsehoods 
and squalors of all kinds. There came 
times when he thought and wrought like 
a roaring storm upon the sea. Many of 
his counsels embody his own spirit. " Be 
ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go 
down upon your wrath [that is, " anger 
run into excess," a word used only here 
in the Bible] : neither give place to the 
devil." And the power of such wrath is 
itself a joy. Robertson of Brighton has 
recalled one of the moments in his own 
life when he felt this : " My blood was at 
the moment running fire, and I remem- 
bered that I had once in my life stood 
before my fellow-creature with words 
that scathed" and blasted; once in my life 
I felt a terrible ' might ; I knew and re- 
joiced to know that I was inflicting the 
sentence of a coward's and a liar's hell." 
There is a vast peril in such power. 
Though we be angry, we are not to sin. 
And how may men feel right wrath and 
escape sin ? In his " Sermon on Resent- 



I04 Christ and Life 

ment," Bishop Butler specifies the con- 
ditions under which righteous wrath be- 
comes sinful: " (i) when, from parti- 
ality to ourselves, we imagine an injury 
done us, when there is none; (2) when 
this partiality represents it to us greater 
than it really is; (3) when we feel re- 
sentment on account of pain or incon- 
venience without injury; (4) when indig- 
nation rises too high; (5) when pain or 
harm is inflicted to gratify that resent- 
ment, though naturally raised." But it is 
safer not to be angry for ourselves at all. 
True wrath must have no selfishness in 
it. It rnust be a zeal, not for personal 
honor, but for the rights of truth and 
purity, and for the glory of Christ. The 
Psalmist's hatred was not of his own foes, 
or for his own wrongs. '' I hate every 
false way." " I hate and abhor false- 
hood." '' I hate them that hate Thee." 
Those may hate who hate evil for its 
hatefulness, and for the sake of God. Be- 
cause he did this, Robertson was saved 
from the perils of his wrath. " I have 
seen him," wrote one of his friends, 



The Nobility of Wrath lOJ 

" grind his teeth and clench his fists 
when passing a man who he knew was 
bent on dishonoring an innocent girl." 
Those may be angry at sin in the world 
who are most angry at sin in themselves. 

" Thou to wax fierce 
In the cause of the Lord I 
Anger and zeal, 
And the joy of the brave, 
Who bade thee to feel, 
Sin's slave? " 

Hate sin in yourself first, and then you 
may hate it in itself and in the world. 

And those can enjoy the exhilaration of 
true wrath, and escape its dangers and 
weakness, who depart never from the 
presence of Christ. To be angry out of 
Him is to exchange bitterness against sin 
for hatred of the sinner, and firmness of 
will for hardness of heart. But he can be 
angry and sin not, and serve God and man 
in his wrath, whose anger is born of " the 
wrath of Almighty God," and " the wrath 
of the Lamb." 



XI 

A CHRISTIAN'S FOES 

" Well do I remember," said Kings- 
ley, of his friend Maurice, " when we 
were looking together at Leonardo da 
Vinci's fresco of the * Last Supper,' his 
complaining, almost with indignation, of 
the girlish and sentimental face which the 
painter, like too many Italians, had given 
to St. John." John was the apostle of 
love, friend of the Saviour and of all men, 
but he was also brother of James, and 
these two the Lord had named Boanerges, 
which is Sons of Thunder. He was the 
one who wrote '' Beloved, let us love one 
another: for love is of God; and every 
one that loveth is begotten of God, and 
knoweth God. . . . And this command- 
ment have we from Him, that he who 
loveth God love his brother also." Yet 
it is the same apostle who speaks bitterly 
io6 



A Christian's Foes 107 

of Satan's possession of Judas and of 
his traitorous character from the begin- 
ning, who never refers to Nicodemus 
without a touch of antagonism to his 
timidity, and who writes of those who 
betray the teaching of Christ, '' If any one 
cometh unto you, and bringeth not this 
teaching, receive him not into your house, 
and give him no greeting: for he that 
giveth him greeting partaketh in his evil 
works." The loving John was no soft 
weakling. His heart was tender, but his 
will was stern toward all falsehood and 
cowardice and sin. He made room in his 
life for enmities as well as affections. 

Now, it may seem at first thought that 
there can be no place for foes and hos- 
tility in the Christian life. We think of it 
as a life of love, of forgiveness, of patient 
endurance of wrongdoing. It is this. But 
it is also a life of hate, of implacableness, 
of eager resistance of wrong. If it needs 
to be rich in friends, it must needs also 
boldly recognise and confront its foes, 
and not cry peace when there is no peace, 
or seek rest when it is a time for action 



io8 Christ and Life 

and conflict. It was just the unwilHng- 
ness to fight wrong and to be defeated 
and die fighting it, if need be, that made 
Erasmus such a weakhng in the seething 
times of the Reformation, while Luther's 
power lay in his huge uncompromising- 
ness, his vigorous struggling against 
wrong, his inability to condone it or to 
be silent before it. 

" I have always been cautious," said 
Erasmus. " I would rather die than 
cause a disturbance in the State. . . . 
When we can do no good, we have a right 
to be silent. A worm hke me must not 
dispute with our lawful rulers. . . . We 
must bear almost anything rather than 
throw the world into confusion. There 
are seasons when we must even conceal 
the truth," 

" I can not abide your lies and decep- 
tions," was Luther's attitude ; " I do not 
go into the struggle because I want to 
do it, but God helping me, I will make no 
compromise with falsehood, and I am 
willing to die for speaking, but I am not 
willing to be silent before wrong." 



A Christian's Foes 109 

God has enemies as well as friends. 
He loves men, but He hates sin. The 
very capacities for love in God involve 
capacities for hate. Jesus also hated as 
well as loved, 'and found the joy of life in 
both. 

" Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated 
wickedness : 
Therefore God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee 
With the oil of gladness above Thy fellows." 

Sin appeared to Him in all its hideous- 
ness. He saw its infinite and horrible 
ravages in the human nature He had as- 
sumed and was trying to redeem. As 
He looked out upon men 

" Bound who should conquer, slaves who 
should be kings," 

and compared their life with His, as he 
struggled to make His truth intelligent 
to their sin-distorted minds, as He laid 
the thrilling love of His Father upon their 
hearts and found them torpid, and God's 
life upon their souls and found them dead, 
as He spoke with" the unmistakable voice 



I lo Christ and Life 

of the true shepherd to the sheep and dis- 
covered that sin had slain their capacity 
to recognise it, He took in all the wicked- 
ness, the ruin, the deadly defilement of 
sin, and He loathed it with all His soul. 

He flung Satan from Him. He de- 
nounced him as the father of lies. He 
fought him to the death, and He wel- 
comed the cross with its shame as the tri- 
umphant instrument for slaying the sin 
of'the world which He hated without re- 
straint. And for His hate of this and 
His love of man, He was willing to live 
and die. 

Now, if Jesus thus hated as well as 
loved, we may be sure that our life can not 
be filled with love alone. We shall have 
to have foes as well as friends. There 
are those who assure us that it need not 
be so. They tell us to think only of the 
admirations of life, to ignore the detesta- 
tions. But this does not show a keen 
knowledge of human nature. The an- 
tagonising faculties of men are stronger 
than their admiring faculties. Get access 
to the hearts of boys and you will find 



A Christian's Foes iii 

that what quickens the pulse of the boy, 
wakens his energies, and commands his 
will, is the thought of struggle. The 
feeble moralists regret that it is so. So 
does the devil. But we are as we are, and 
God deals with us as we are. He knows 
that we need admirations and He pro- 
vides them. He knows that we need de- 
testations and He points to sin and says, 
Behold your foe ! 

It is true that love of the holy and 
noble must be the dominant thought of 
life, and that hatred of the unworthy and 
evil must not usurp the whole of life. But 
it must be there as the background and 
buttress of the love of the good. There 
can be no guarantee that the front of Ufe 
will be safe save in the protection of the 
rear, and life can reach up into the good 
only by mounting upon and trampling 
down the evil. If men just play with evil 
and look with negative indifference on 
sin, they walk in peril greater than they 
know. The man who would be serene 
must combine, as Robertson of Brighton 
did, " a hatred and resistance of evil and 



1 12 Christ and Life 

a reverence and effort for purity." " Hate 
the evil, and love the good," cries the 
prophet Amos, and on such a life of 
double power he is sure '' the Lord, the 
God of hosts, will be gracious." 

Because sin in its abstract form can 
not come to us, we are to hate it in its 
concrete manifestations. Let us look 
upon these as our legitimate foes, and 
plan our life not as a search for beauty 
and purity only, but, of necessity and for 
the very reason that we are earnest in our 
desire for beauty and purity, as a cam- 
paign against these definite adversaries. 

Sin comes to us in books and pictures. 
Do not touch the books and pictures in 
which sin comes, if they belong to others. 
Destroy them if they are yours. Sin 
comes in certain places. They warm the 
heart toward sin's approaches. Flee 
from such places. Sin lures us with the 
pleasure of certain acts, small at first 
and solitary. Smite it, oh, smite it! Sin 
comes creeping to us in a thousand ways. 
Hurl it out into the night of which it is 
the exhalation. 



A Christian's Foes 113 

But are we to hurt persons and antag- 
onise them? What are persons? Im- 
mortal spirits diversely manifesting 
themselves, often inconsistently, opposite 
passions and inclinations contending for 
the mastery. We can not take the same 
attitude toward all of these diverse ele- 
ments. What is good and worthy we 
can admire. The immortality which is 
revealed in all we are to respect and love. 
All that is evil and wrong we are to hate, 
and if the person will not be dissevered 
from the evil that defiles, if he resolutely 
and willfully commits himself to the 
service of evil, we are to oppose him. 
As John Willis Gleed says, though it is. a 
course needing great caution and prayer, 
*' When a man has proved himself a 
thorough-paced scoundrel, treat him like 
one, affront him, oppose him, risk some- 
thing, risk all, to break down his influ- 
ence, to terminate his career ; do this and 
you will feel a happiness inside you that 
is royal — and you will be as one among 
a thousand." 

Bad men who are doing evil and lov- 



114 Christ and Life 

ing evil are not to be treated by us as 
sincere but weak men who are led mis- 
takenly astray. One of the curses of 
society now is that a man may often be 
an adulterer, a gambler, a public curse, 
and yet be received as though he were 
innocent and honest. That Christian life 
which slurs over the immorality of such 
men as though it were not is an inverte- 
brate thing. They are the foes of Christ. 
They can not be our friends. 

In the simple, quiet life of most Chris- 
tians perhaps no questions of great diffi- 
culty will arise. Sin will present itself 
in impersonal ways, and can be despised 
and fought just as sin. But in all Chris- 
tian lives there must be the capacity at 
least for sympathy with the heart of the 
Psalmist, who wrote: — 

" I hate them that are of a wicked mind ; 
But Thy law do I love. 
Through Thy precepts I get understanding: 
Therefore I hate every false way. 
I hate and abhor falsehood, 
But Thy law do I love." 



A Christian's Foes 115 

We may never fall into lukewarmness 
toward evil or evil men. There is no 
power or safety for us but in a heart cold 
toward the enticements of wrong, and 
hot in resentment against it. Our prayer 
must be the prayer the boys of Phillips 
Andover and Hotchkiss are taught to 
pray : " O God, whom none can love ex- 
cept they hate the thing that is evil, and 
who wiliest by Thy Son, our Saviour, to 
redeem us from all iniquity, deliver us 
when we are tempted to look on sin 
without abhorrence, and let the virtue 
of His passion come between us and the 
enemy of our souls, through the same 
Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen." 



XII 

CHRISTIAN THINKING 

One curious characteristic of our day 
is the divorce of opinion from character. 
It is assumed that men can perceive the 
truth in thought regardless of whether 
they are true in Hfe. The proper tone of 
discussion and intercourse is impersonal, 
questions of moral attitude and personal 
life being reserved from scrutiny. There 
is undoubtedly some justification of this. 
It is much easier to get along in this way, 
and those who dislike to have their in- 
most character too publicly exposed can 
be much more cheerful in such a world. 
Politics becomes, for example, a more 
comfortable field for activity when it is 
held to be improper to introduce ques- 
tions of moral character, and when a 
man is given credit for opinion which 
has no guarantee in the fibre of his moral 
ii6 



Christian Thinking 117 

nature. Unregenerate men write books 
on theology, and in some countries even 
hold theological chairs, while the man 
who writes the religious editorials on a 
great daily may himself be an intemper- 
ate and irreligious man. It is easy to call 
this hypocrisy, but it is quit» adequately 
sanctioned by the spirit of our day. A 
man of orthodox opinion may be marked 
by much uncharitableness and bitterness 
of nature, and a man of amiable nature by 
much dishonest slovenliness of opinion, 
and each be unconscious of his defect, or 
cover it with the mantle of his possessed 
virtue. 

The true Christian will have done with 
this immoral separation of thought and 
character. How can a man think true 
who is false? Men do what they do and 
think what they think because they are 
what they are. Our minds are not mech- 
anisms which work with mathematical 
precision irrespective of our personal 
dispositions. They are ourselves, and all 
that we are shapes them. We shall see 
this emphasised more and more among 



1 1 8 Christ and Life 

Christians, however difficult it makes liv- 
ing. Truth is personal and vital, and not 
merely opinion. Ritschl was right at 
least in insisting upon the religious 
values of doctrines and refusing to build 
systems out of bloodless propositions. 
And Paul was right in anchoring 
thought in being, and in leaping at some 
defect of shortcoming or excess in char- 
acter or life, where he found defect in 
opinion. Paul preached what he was and 
had experienced. 

" There is no beauty," as Professor 
Royce says, " no, nor any truth, in a 
metaphysical system which does not 
spring from its value as a record of a 
spiritual experience." And the Chris- 
tian must test his opinion on the touch- 
stone of his character, and refuse to 
recognise the thinking faculties as inde- 
pendent of the moral and emotional life. 

The Christian, while thus cordially 
surrendering much of what is now called 
the freedom of opinion, will become in 
reality much freer in his opinions. He 
will smile at a great many unexamined 



Christian Thinking 119 

dicta which now rule men. Such a half 
truth, for example, as our proverb, 
" Knowledge is power," he will cheer- 
fully denounce as a half lie. All knowl- 
edge is not power. Some ignorance is 
vastly more powerful than some knowl- 
edge. There is, as Milton says, a 

" Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing 
ill," 

and sometimes the price to a true-souled 
man is prohibitive. Charles Lamb did 
not exhaust the list of " popular 
fallacies." 

And the paradoxes and present diffi- 
culties of religious opinion will have 
fewer terrors for us. If, as is certainly 
true, our personal life can not absorb the 
infinite God, neither can our intellectual 
nature comprehend and exhaust Him. 
Why should our failure to do so occa- 
sion us the least concern or distress? It 
would be distressing rather to think 
through God, so to speak, and come out 
on the other side with no more object of 
thought beyond. It lies in the very idea 



I20 Christ and Life 

of God that He is greater than we. We 
shall not be so ambitious that we can not 
be satisfied with a God greater than our 
thoughts. And so, further, the neces- 
sary antinomies of thought, when we 
reason out of our experience into the 
transcendent, will give us no perplexity. 
We shall smilingly accept them and over 
the greatest one of them shall say. 

" Our wills are ours we know not how, 
Our wills are ours to make them Thine." 

Not in the least disconcerted by these 
paradoxes over which our fathers quar- 
relled, insisting on believing only one side 
or the other, instead of both, we shall 
not be in anywise disturbed by the honest 
search of honest and humble-hearted men 
for light and truth. The light and truth 
of God are seeking men more eagerly 
than any man can seek them, and they 
are not to be feared. And as for prideful 
and untrue search, it will be as incapa- 
ble of finding new as it is of discredit- 
ing or destroying old truth. And of 
how little consequence in reality is that 



Christian Thinking lai 

which is to be found in comparison with 
what has been found already! The 
foundations were laid long ago and are 
neither to be shaken nor to be relaid. As 
Harnack has said, in " Christianity and 
History " : " The great and simple truths 
which Christ came to preach, the per- 
sonal sacrifice which He made and His 
victory in death were what formed the 
new life of His community ; and when the 
apostle Paul, with divine power, de- 
scribed this life as a life in the Spirit, 
and again as a life in love, he was only 
giving back the light which had dawned 
upon him in and through Jesus Christ, 
his Lord." 

We are feeling the influence of a 
healthy reaction against the attempt to 
codify the universe in a human system. 
Our God, who is great enough to be be- 
yond our levelling comprehension, is 
great enough to extend beyond our sys- 
tems. Not one man out of a hundred 
thousand can carry his system of com- 
plete religious speculation with him^ and 
not one out of a thousand can sit 



laa Christ and Life 

down and write it out articulately. But 
this emancipation from the attempts at 
the impossible which only mechanicalise 
and devitalise our religious thought will 
not excuse us from honest study or de- 
liver us to an intellectual license. That 
thought is to be personal and vital is no 
excuse for its ceasing to be thought. It 
is easy to plead what is practical as an 
excuse from what is thorough. 

The Christian man must think himself. 
He will look at evidence with wide open, 
level eyes, and neither party cries, nor 
the taunt of those whose inclinations 
provide them with prejudices which pass 
for opinions, nor indolence will befog his 
thought or make him satisfied to accept 
impressions of his own, or assertions of 
others as the accredited truth. He will 
give heed to the objects of thought which 
Paul specifies in the last chapter of the 
Epistle to the Philippians, but he will re- 
member, also, that on these things Paul 
bade men to do some thinking, and that 
the point of his admonition is lost if all 



Christian Thinking 123 

the emphasis is laid on " these things " 
and none on " think." 

The immense mechanical and scientific 
changes of our day often tempt men to 
think that very little is established and 
unmoved, and that all things are uncer- 
tain. The right temper of mind is alert 
progressiveness, welcoming change, 
ready to perceive and greet each fresh 
advance. It is not hard to exaggerate 
this into an easy contempt for what has 
been. And some suppose the temper of 
the coming day will be yet more progres- 
sive and free from the constraint of the 
past. It may be earnestly hoped that it 
will not be so. What is all that has been 
discovered during our day compared 
with what was known before? 

All the fresh inventions and new 
knowledge are valuable, but before they 
came true men hated lies, and true hearts 
loved, and there were gentleness and un- 
selfishness and strong service among 
men. And these secrets are more than 
mechanical invention and improvements 



124 Christ and Life 

in the arts. The best part of knowledge 
was here in our fathers' day and the 
days of their fathers before them. And 
the coming men will understand this and 
not lose their heads in the idolatry of 
innovation. The faith was once given to 
the saints, and once for all, and though 
men will understand it better from age 
to age it is still the old faith of divine 
love and human duty. 

Let us hope that the thought of the 
future will prove more modest. We are 
but little creatures, reading ourselves 
into the placid universe which was before 
us and will be after us, save as we dis- 
cover our littleness in ourselves and wake 
to our greatness in God. Our thoughts 
must be humble and contrite as our 
hearts. 

We may be sure, too, that however the 
influences of education may appear now 
to be working toward mechanical ration- 
alism of thought, they will not succeed in 
killing the bloom and drying the blood of 
life. " Religious thinking, ethical think- 
ing, poetical thinking, teleogical, emo- 



Christian Thinking 125 

tional, sentimental thinking, what we 
might call the personal view of life, to 
distinguish it from the impersonal and 
mechanical, and the romantic view of 
life, to distinguish it from the rational- 
istic view, have been," as Professor 
James says, " and still are, outside of 
well-drilled scientific circles, the domi- 
nant forms of thought/' There will be 
a battle necessary to keep them so. The 
machine shop view of life, which some of 
our best institutions are devoting their 
energies to establish and extend, is gain- 
ing sway over the virtues of men, killing 
their spring and beauty, and even over 
the vices of men, too, destroying their 
hideousness and making for them a 
philosophic defense as the springs of a 
richer human experience. Against all 
this true Christians will erect the fra- 
grant, poetical, personal, divinely moral 
thought of life for which Jesus stood, 
and of which He is ever the fountain and 
the guarantee. 

Our Lord Jesus Christ will be the 
norm of Christian thought. '' I am the 



126 Christ and Life 

Truth," He is still saying. And the true 
Christian will bring every thought into 
captivity to His obedience and will dis- 
cover therein perfect liberty, and 
heavenly vision and all the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge hidden. He will 
bring his mind to Christ that he may 
make the mind that was in Christ his 
own. 



xiir 

A CHRISTIAN'S THOUGHTS 

We are not always acting, but we are 
always thinking. Yet we watch our acts, 
and shape them carefully lest they be 
wrong and, by their evil, influence us to 
greater evil. Because they are external, 
however, and because they are occa- 
sional, they scarcely mold us as our 
thoughts mold us, which are most inti- 
mate with us and never are absent from 
us. Whoever would deal with what most 
deeply concerns his personal life, must 
deal with his thoughts. " He that would 
govern his actions by the laws of 
virtue," wrote Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
" must regulate his thoughts by those of 
reason; he must keep guilt from the 
recesses of his heart, and remember that 
the pleasures of fancy and the emotions 
of desire are more dangerous as they are 
127 



128 Christ and Life 

hidden, since they escape the sense of 
observation, and operate equally in every 
situation, without the concurrence of 
external opportunities." 

This was what Jesus told the Phari- 
sees and scribes. They were most care- 
ful about matters of purely external be- 
havior, conformity to petty, exacting 
standards of propriety and conduct. He 
bade them to give heed to the real source 
of evil and weakness in life. '' The 
things which proceed out of the mouth 
come forth out of the heart; and they 
defile the man. For out of the heart 
come forth evil thoughts : . . . but to 
eat with unwashen hands defileth not the 
man." We are full of care for the outer 
crust of life. Jesus is heedless of it. He 
goes straight to its core. What men do. 
He knows, will be determined by what 
they are in the inmost chambers of their 
imagination and desire. Even though 
the outer acts be for a time blameless, 
the life is unworthy if there is unworthi- 
ness in its secret places. Nor can it long 
confine and conceal the unworthiness 



A Christian's Thoughts 129 

there. But even if it could, it would be 
unworthy to have anything that could 
not be revealed. Marcus Aurelius held 
this high ideal. '' Accustom yourself/' 
he said, " to think upon nothing but what 
you could freely reveal, if the question 
were put to you; so that if your soul 
were laid open, there would appear noth- 
ing but what was sincere, good-natured, 
and public spirited — not so much as one 
voluptuous or luxurious fancy, nothing 
of hatred, envy, or unreasonable sus- 
picion, nor aught else that you could not 
bring to the light without blushing." 

Every day we are becoming more like 
our thoughts. If they are mean and self- 
ish, we can not prevent ourselves from 
becoming so. If they are unclean and 
evil, our character and conduct will in- 
evitably be shaped by them. It is true 
that *' as a man thinketh in his heart so 
is he." As Charles Kingsley says: 
" Think about yourself ; about what you 
want, what you like, what respect peo- 
ple ought to pay you, and then to you 
nothing will be pure. You will spoil ev- 



130 Christ and Life 

erything you touch; you will make sin 
and misery for yourself out of every« 
thing which God sends you; you will be 
as wretched as you choose, on earth or in 
heaven either." And on the other hand, 
loving thoughts will produce loving acts, 
and a generous, kindly way of regarding 
others in our own minds will bring us to 
a generous, kindly treatment of them in 
daily life. 

We have to think, whether we choose 
to do 50 or not. As Sir W. Temple says, 
" Man is a thinking being, whether he 
will or no; all he can do is to turn his 
thoughts the best way." As soon as we 
wake in the morning our thoughts begin. 
We cannot stop thinking any minute dur- 
ing the day. The attempt to stop is a 
sure way to make the mind more active 
still. 

Of what shall we think? Satan is al- 
ways suggesting evil thoughts. Often in 
our best hours, in prayer or even at the 
Lord's Supper, some wrong imagination 
will flash upon us. We can not under- 
stand why it should have come. We can 



A Christian's Thoughts 131 

prevent its staying with us. " I can not 
prevent foul birds from flying over my 
head," said an old Christian, " but I 
can prevent them from building their 
nests in my hair." And how may such 
evil thoughts be driven away? Not by 
fighting with them. The more we 
wrestle with them the tighter they grip 
us. 

They can only be driven away by dis- 
placement. We can thrust them out with 
good thoughts. This was the way John 
Bunyan, as he tells us, came to write 
" Pilgrim's Progress." 

"Nor did I intend 
But to divert myself in doing this 
From worser thoughts, which make me do 

amiss." 

When an evil imagination or a frivolous 
or envious thought or a sinful coveting 
or any wrong desire comes into the mind, 
ignore it and turn your mind at once 
upon some stronger and nobler object 
fitted to command and captivate your 
thoughts. This was Lewis Carroll's 



132 Christ and Life 

counsel. He wrote, explaining his mo- 
tive in writing " Pillow Problems " : 
" Perhaps I may venture for a moment to 
use a more serious tone and to point out 
that there are mental troubles much worse 
than mere worry, for which an absorbing 
object of thought may serve as a remedy. 
There are skeptical thoughts which seem 
for the moment to uproot the firmest 
faith; there are blasphemous thoughts 
which dart unbidden into the most rever- 
ent souls; there are unholy thoughts 
v^hich torture with their hateful presence 
the fancy that would fain be pure. Against 
all these some real mental work is a most 
helpful ally. That ' unclean spirit ' of 
the parable, who brought back with him 
seven others more wicked than himself, 
only did so because he found the cham- 
ber ' swept and garnished ' and its owner 
sitting with folded hands. Had he found 
it all alive with the ' busy hum ' of active 
* work ' there would have been scant wel- 
come for him and his seven." Obey 
Paul's injunction to " bring every thought 
into obedience to the captivity of Christ." 



A Christian's Thoughts 133 

He is able to subdue all our thoughts, 
and to expel from them everything that 
can not live in His presence. 

Our thoughts are our innermost life. 
We carry them with us and can not es- 
cape from them. In them we can have 
always the richest companionships. 
" They are never alone," says Sir PhiHp 
Sidney, " that are accompanied with 
noble thoughts." Or we may have in 
them the most wretched associates from 
whom we can not flee. Have you learned 
to be content when alone with your own 
mind? or do you flee from such solitude, 
seeking something to divert you or to 
occupy you? Jesus had no fear of being 
alone. He could sit for hours on the 
hillside looking out over the fields and 
the streams and the distant sea. The 
flowers at His feet held 

"Thoughts that did often lie too deep for 

tears," 

and spoke to Him of the care and the 
perfect workmanship of the Father. The 
winds suggested to Him the unseen mov- 



134 Christ and Life 

ings of the Divine Spirit. Yonder little 
lambs and the sheep, and the shepherd 
bearing in his arms the weak ones of the 
flock, spoke to His heart of that Shepherd 
love and care which found its best illus- 
tration in Him. Life was not an empty, 
prosaic thing to Jesus. It can be a rich 
joy to us if we love to think, and to think 
especially about all the meanings of God. 

One great mistake which we make in 
our thoughts lies in our willingness to 
let them drift or settle upon ourselves. 
We think of our plans, our possessions, 
our moods, our acts, our failures. Some- 
times we do this with deliberate atten- 
tion, and again our minds just wander 
hither because there is no strong hand on 
the tiller guiding them elsewhere. Now 
drifting is a bad thing in every part of 
our lives, and it is bad and damaging in 
our thoughts. It takes away the power 
of application and sustained reasoning 
and it usually ends in our filling our 
thoughts with what is unworthy. 

God is the proper object of our 
thought. " We must converse with our- 



A Christian's Thoughts 135 

selves only of God," says Pascal. We 
should love to fix our minds on Him and 
to think of His goodness, His love, His 
great deeds for us, and His constant 
present interest in us. We think of our 
love of God or of our service of God. It 
is right to do this sometimes, but it is 
certain to depress and belittle us if our 
thoughts are true; for how cold is our 
love of God, and how poor is our service ! 
On the other hand, it is an expansive 
and ennobling thing to meditate upon 
the greatness of God's love for us and 
the splendid breadth and depth of His 
service for us. If, as Marcus Aurelius 
says, " Our life is what our thoughts 
make it," then the surest road to godli- 
ness is to think upon God and to do this 
attentively. 

Yet few of us can be always holding 
our thoughts under strict rule. They 
will drift away to their own place. What 
is that place with us ? With some it may 
be fashions of dress, with others invest- 
ments, with others books, with others 
vices, with others friends. Wherever 



136 Christ and Life 

our treasure is there our heart and our 
thoughts will be. If Christ is our true 
treasure, He will be the natural place of 
our thoughts, and whenever released 
from the pressure of this or that absorb- 
ing duty, they will slip away to Him. 
He is far better than any thing or any 
other person to think upon, and He has 
that compelling power which holds us in 
a captivity as strong as it is sweet. 

Have 3'ou thought of Jesus once to- 
day? Each day should begin with sweet 
thoughts of Christ, and there should be 
set times in it for recalling Him, and He 
should have the last thoughts of all. By 
such discipline, at last even our dreams 
may gather round Him. In truth, very 
few people ever dream of Christ, because 
few think enough about Him during the 
day. But life becomes a new thing when 
Jesus wins lordship over its unordered 
thoughts and the mind turns to Him as its 
true resting place and home. And He is 
Himself the source of all fair and sweet 
things. 

The great counsel of Paul, " Whatso- 



A Christian's Thoughts 137 

ever things are true, whatsoever things 
are honest, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever 
things are lovely, whatsoever things are 
of good report; if there be any virtue, 
and if there be any praise, think on these 
things" (Phil, iv: 8), may be reduced 
for us to the simple rule. Think on 
Christ. That is the conclusion of the 
whole matter. And it is the beginning of 
such blessed things as few know. 



XIV 

THE PLACE AND POWER OF 
HABITS 

Life is of necessity a large part habit. 
As soon as we begin to live we begin to 
form habits. Breathing becomes an un- 
conscious custom, and moves smoothly 
on by day and by night. We fall into 
innumerable personal ways that are pe- 
culiar to us alone, and betray us. Acts 
done at first at random, or with but oc- 
casional will, are repeated until the habit 
of doing them becomes set with us. A 
moment's thought upon our life will 
show each of us 

" How use doth breed a habit in a man." 

And how much of our life is made up of 
unthinking obedience to such habits. 
" Habit," says Carlyle, " is the deepest 
law of human nature." 
138 



The Place and Power of Habits 139 

Jesus had His habits. He made it His 
habit to do always the will of His Father. 
He had acquired the custom of going to 
the Nazareth synagogue on Sabbaths and 
reading the Scripture lessons. Luke 
iv : 16. It was His wont to talk to the 
people when they gathered to Him. Mark 
x:i. And there were certain places 
where it was His habit to go with regu- 
larity. Luke xxii : 39. 

Our habits hold for us the secret of 
joy and liberty, or of sorrow and slavery 
in life. On the one hand by carelessness 
or by the deliberate choice of evil acts, 
one after another, we can bind ourselves 
in the most hopeless bondage. The ter- 
rible thing about such servitude is the 
insidiousness of its approach. As Dry- 
den says: 

" 111 habits gather by unseen degrees, — 
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas." 

An evil imagination or wrong desire is 
cherished once. The second time it 
comes back more easily and lingers 
longer. The third time resistance is 



140 Christ and Life 

feebler still. Soon all struggle ceases 
and the freedom of purity is gone. It is 
so also with unholy or unlovely acts. As 
John Foster says in his Journal, " The 
mind is weak where it has once given 
way. It is long before a principle re- 
stored can become as firm as one that 
has never been moved. It is as the case 
of the mound of a reservoir; if the 
mound has in one place been broken, 
whatever care has been taken to make 
the repaired part as strong as possible, 
the probability is that if it gives way 
again, it will be in that place." Bishop 
Whately also speaks of this : " It is im- 
portant to keep in mind that habits are 
formed, not at one stroke, but gradu- 
ally and insensibly; so that unless vigi- 
lant care be employed, a great change 
may come over the character without 
our being conscious of any. For, as 
Doctor Johnson has well expressed it, 
* The diminutive chains of habit are sel- 
dom heavy enough to be felt, till they 
are too strong to be broken.' " 

The only sure ways to conquer evii 



The Place and Power of Habits 141 

habits are to frustrate them in their be- 
ginning, and to occupy the ground with 
good. To escape the habit of evil 
thoughts, do not read books or look at 
pictures which suggest them. To escape 
the habit of fault-finding, of uncharitable 
judgments, refuse to discover or to dwell 
upon the defects of others. Every habit 
begins as an act. Even if the first battle 
is lost make a great deal of it, and enter 
the next one with indomitable purpose, 
and do not lose that one, A victory there 
will hurl the incipient habit back upon it- 
self in ruin. " Those who are in the 
power of evil habits must conquer as 
they can, — and conquered they must be, 
or neither wisdom nor happiness can be 
attained ; — but those who are not yet 
subject to their influence may, by timely 
caution, preserve their freedom; they 
may effectually resolve to escape the ty- 
rant whom they will very vainly resolve 
to conquer." 

But how can evil habits be conquered 
when once formed? Well, if Christ is 
to save men He must be able to save them 



142 Christ and Life 

here. He sharpens the discernment of 
the act which lies at the root of the 
habit, and He begins in the will of His 
disciple a battle against such acts, taken 
one by one. But beyond that, He begins 
a rear attack on evil habit by pushing out 
upon the ground thus occupied the forces 
of good habit. Against the habit of evil 
thought He leads the will in a resolute 
struggle with each separate suggestion 
as it creeps up out of the swamps like 
miasma; but, also, He creates the habit 
of sweet thought upon Christ, who is 
the most compelling object of thought 
our minds can know. By and by we be- 
come strong enough to defeat habit in 
part by taking its soldiers one by one, 
when, lo! the army of our adversary is 
gone, for the host of good habit from 
behind has cleared the field. 

It is a splendid truth that good habits 
grow just as bad habits grow, by 
easy and unconscious increase. A 
Christian boy refuses to lie. Again 
the temptation comes, and he refuses 
with steady heart. Again the temptation 



The Place and Power of Habits 143 

knocks, but the lad never hears. His 
habit of truthfulness has made the temp- 
tation to lie no temptation to him. And 
this is the liberty of noble habit. It lifts 
us above all the temptations whose vic- 
tory over us would result in the con- 
trary habits of evil. A pure home, pure 
friends, pure books, and a pure heart, 
carry the man who has been blessed with 
them through defilement and stain, and 
they never touch his spirit. He scarcely 
knows that he has been surrounded by 
them. 

There is a sort of automatic moral in- 
tegrity about upright habits. They make 
evil actions impossible. The man who is 
set in such habits has no need to think 
over and reason out his course of action. 
His moral conscience is so clear in its in- 
tegrity that it acts for him spontaneously. 
When a true man is solicited to do evil, 
firm habit takes him by force and wheels 
him about, and before he knows it has 
swept him out of harm's way. The 
man is in danger who has to reason over 
the simple question of truth and purity. 



144 Christ and Life 

If truth and purity have become habits 
of his will they will act before he can 
think. Good habit makes the elementary 
problems of the moral life nondebatable 
and the primary moral judgments instan- 
taneous and irresistible. 

This is the liberty of good habits which 
contrasts with the slavery of evil habit. 
This is what Lord Brougham had in 
mind when he said : '' I trust everything 
under God, to habit, upon which, in all 
of us, the lawgiver as well as the school- 
master has mainly placed his reliance; 
habit which makes everything easy and 
casts all difficulties upon the deviation 
from a wonted course. Make sobriety a 
habit, and intemperance will be hateful; 
make prudence a habit, and reckless prof- 
ligacy will be as contrary to the nature 
of the child, grown or adult, as the most 
atrocious crimes are to any of us." 
Doing good, telling the truth, loving the 
clean, hating the foul, soon become hab- 
its, and the temptations to selfishness, to 
falsehood, to impurity, fall off from us 
without awaking in us the least response. 



The Place and Power of Habits 145 

Habit is not a matter of the intellec- 
tual or moral life alone. We acquire 
spiritual habits also. Prayer can become 
a habit. Prayerlessness can become a 
habit. The sense of God's presence can 
become an habitual consciousness. We 
can drift into the habit of forgetfulness 
of God. We can acquire the habit of 
Bible love and Bible study, or can habit- 
ually neglect the Book whose neglect 
means starvation of soul. Men have 
trained themselves into the habit of ma- 
terialism. To them no fact is a fact that 
is not a physical fact. Other men have 
acquired the habit of perceiving the spir- 
itual significance of all things and of 
reading life in terms of the spirit. We 
can slip into the habit of self-will, or we 
can learn to sing truly to God — 

" To do Thy will the habit of my heart." 

The very purpose of the Spirit of God 
in dealing with us is to school us into 
the habits of Christ; not to spur us to 
an isolated act of righteousness, but to es- 
tablish us in holy and noble ways. 



146 Christ and Life 

Indeed, Christianity was from the be- 
ginning called a way, i. e., a custom, a 
habit. Jesus taught '' the ways of God." 
He called Himself "The Way." Paul 
spoke of the new teachings as " that 
way." He had himself, when he became 
a Christian, certain '* ways in Christ," 
which he taught everywhere in every 
church. Christianity is the habit of love, 
the habit of service, the habit of right- 
eousness, the habit of holiness. It is not 
a spasm of sentiment, or of activity. It 
is a character of truth and purity 
wrought by the Spirit of Christ out of 
those habits which are the ways of Jesus. 

Each one of us is strengthening every 
day his habits of body, mind, and spirit; 
and these habits are every day making 
or undoing us. We have in them an en- 
ginery of almost limitless power for evil 
or for good. We make choice between 
the ways of God and the ways of sin. 
We do this in each act, and the multitude 
of such choices creates a habit ; and these 
ways have their ends, and the end of the 
habit of sin is death, and the end of the 



The Place and Power of Habits 147 

way of God is life. Yea, and more than 
this. What lies at the end of each way 
lies along each way. The death that 
is the end of the habit of evil is in each 
act of evil ; and the Hfe that is in the end 
of the habit of good is in each act of 
good. Our habits bring us at the last 
to that which is in principle in each sep- 
arate act by which the habit was formed, 
and in which it expresses itself. 

The only way for each disciple of 
Christ is the way of God, the way of 
holiness ; that is the way of those who 
hear the call to divine habits in the words 
of Jesus, " Ye therefore shall be perfect 
as your heavenly Father is perfect." 



XV 

CHRISTIAN FEELING 

If one sets forth the legitimacy of re- 
ligious feeling, it is not through any de- 
sire to discredit thought, but only to 
claim for the feelings a place which is 
rightly theirs, but from which many are 
seeking to exclude them, partly because 
of their admitted dangers of excess, and 
partly because of an undue exaltation of 
our opinionative nature. By what right 
is our whole personality, emotional and 
volitional, subjected to opinion? Who 
has demonstrated that opinion is the in- 
fallible guide? Who has proved that 
feeling has led more men astray than 
opinion? Opinion is not the cool, unbi- 
assed, infallible thing the temper of our 
day supposes it. There is, at least, as 
much intellectual heresy and insanity 
current as emotional. 
148 



Christian Feeling 149 

I am not trying to make out a case for 
the superiority of any one part of our life 
over another, least of all to the disadvan- 
tage of thought as the necessary check 
and balance wheel of hfe; but merely 
representing that the narrow-minded 
and unphilosophical course is that of 
those who would turn us into scientific 
thinking machines, with emotion and 
will and all the richness of our person- 
ality in perpetual ostracism. If they suc- 
ceeded we should have a very prosaic 
time sitting on the crust of life, with 
dust in our veins instead of blood. Not 
so! 

" Thought is deeper than all speech, 
Feeling deeper than all thought ; 
Souls to souls can never teach 
What unto themselves was taught. 

" We are spirits clad in veils ; 
Man by man was never seen ; 
All our deep communing fails 
To remove the shadowy screen." 

We need not then be ashamed of our 
feelings or conceal them or endeavor to 
discredit or suppress them. As Pascal 



150 Christ and Life 

says, " The heart has reasons which the 
reason does not know. It is the heart 
that feels God, not the reason. There 
are truths that are felt, and there are 
truths that are proved, for we know truth 
not only by the reason, but by that in- 
stinctive conviction which may be called 
the heart. The primary truths are not 
demonstrable, and yet our knowledge of 
them is none the less certain. Principles 
are felt ; propositions are proved. Truths 
may be above reason, and yet not be con- 
trary to reason." Feeling should be given 
its just place as an organ of knowledge, 
supplying its own measure, correcting 
the error of the opinionative nature, and 
saving us to our real life. With what 
one of us has it not done this? 

" If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' 
And heard an ever breaking shore 
That tumbled in the godless deep ; 

" A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And like a man in wrath, the heart 
Stood up and answered, ' I have felt ! ' '* 



Christian Feeling iji 

There is a constant oscillation in life 
between the extreme of emphasis on the 
objective fact recognised by reason, and 
the extreme of emphasis on the subjec- 
tive fact recognised by feeling. But the 
true life is the one that never loses either 
emphasis. Jesus is the historic Saviour 
of man and the present Lord of life, un- 
conditioned as to His existence by any 
personal recognition by man. And the 
work that He did and is doing is in one 
aspect an objective work, independent of 
human acceptance and experience. But 
He is also the present indwelling Life, 
apprehended by a range of faculties not 
exercised upon the material world, and 
the true Christian knows Him in a true 
and precious mysticism. 

The word " mysticism " should not 
terrify Christians. And no charge of 
emotional excess and unreliability, or of 
disregard of the objective foundations of 
spiritual truth, or, to use Law's words, 
" of setting up an inward Saviour in 
opposition to that outward Christ whose 
history is recorded in the Gospel " should 



152 Christ and Life 

dismay him. For, to quote Law's reply : 
" Was I to say that a plant, a vegetable, 
must have the sun within it, must have 
the life, light and virtues of the sun in- 
corporated in it, that it has no benefit 
from the sun till the sun is thus inwardly 
forming, generating, quickening and 
raising up a life of the sun's virtues in 
it, would this be setting up an inward 
sun in opposition to the outward one? 
Could anything be more ridiculous than 
such a charge? For is not all that is 
here said of an inward sun in the vege- 
table so much said of a power and virtue 
derived from the sun in the firmament? 
So, in like manner, all that is said of an 
inward Christ, inwardly formed and gen- 
erated in the root of the soul, is only 
so much said of an inward life, brought 
forth by the power and efficacy of that 
blessed Christ who was born of the Vir- 
gin Mary." 

Unconcealedly yielding to Christ the 
rule of his feelings, he who is Christ's 
should desire to resemble Christ in 
his feelings. The moral must transcend 



Christian Feeling 153 

the aesthetic in his tastes. If what he 
believes to be true and what the world 
believes to be beautiful conflict, he will 
prefer his truth to its beauty. " Fair " 
with him will be the synonym of *' pure.'' 
He will combine if he can a right inde- 
pendence with a delicate sensitiveness. 
One of the sayings of the late Master of 
Balliol, preserved in his " Letters," was 
that " sensitiveness is a great hindrance 
to action — other men who have their own 
ends in view and perceive that you are 
sensitive will not desist from hurting 
you. It may be partly overcome. It has 
some compensatin.s;- advantages. One 
enters more into the thoughts of other 
people." " F ," wrote General Gor- 
don to his sister, '' is more humble and 
better tempered than I am, and in conse- 
quence he is sometimes bullied about 
things, so tell him to stick up more." 
To combine these things — a virile 
strength of assertion and a gentle sensi- 
tiveness — will be a hard task, not likely 
to be attempted by any outside of Christ's 
school, but obligatory upon those within. 



154 Christ and Life 

They will be praying always, " In the 
gentleness of Christ, O Christ, my soul 
array,'' but also, '' Help me to quit my- 
self like a man and be strong." 

A great wretchedness of much of our 
present religious feeling is its excess of 
self-consciousness. We feel and then we 
feel that we feel. This kills naturalness. 
The autobiographical analysis feeds this 
sort of thing, and the tone of our com- 
monplace conversation, so much about 
people, cultivates the habit of self-con- 
sideration. Somehow we shall have to 
learn how to keep the proper checks on 
feeling and yet have it natural and free. 
The rule of great principles over the feel- 
ing will help us here. When we love 
what is worthy with a controlling love, 
we shall think not of our love, but of the 
worthiness of its object. And, on the 
other hand, great hatreds will absorb in 
loathing of the hateful thing all half-the- 
atrical consciousness of self. 

And there will be more and more need 
of great hatreds. Our talk of charity 
and tolerance must not blind us to the 



Christian Feeling 155 

call for bitterness and wrath against all 
unrighteousness and ungodliness. The 
true Christian must know how to feel 
contempt as well as admiration and de- 
testation as well as love. It is related of 
old Joshua Leavitt that once he greeted 
an advocate of the free love abomination 
who came to see him with the words, 
'* Sir, I abhor you, I abhor you, I abhor 
you." ** Do not I hate them which hate 
Thee?" asks David, and repHes, "Yea, 
I hate them with perfect hatred." It 
was wrong to hate them as persons, but 
it was wrong to do other than hate their 
hatred of God. Soft and easy toleration 
of everything will be called by the hon- 
est names of treason and dishonor. To 
apologise for lust and sin is to become 
partner with it, and every Christian will 
feel a holy horror of all such guilt and 
an utter anger against all that worketh 
abomination or that maketh a lie. No 
feeling of love for the pure can long sur- 
vive a decadence of the feeling of hatred 
of the impure. 

The dominant characteristic of the 



156 Christ and Life 

right feelings of Christians is not new. It 
is simply the Christian passion of all the 
ages — a great tenderness towards Christ, 
a love of His beauty and His gentleness. 
" It seems to me," says one of Miss 
Fowler's characters, " that nowadays 
men think and talk too much about im- 
proving their own characters and medi- 
tate too little upon the perfection of the 
Divine Character." We shall in the com- 
ing time think more of Him in humil- 
ity and human love, and perhaps we can 
succeed in escaping from the lofty am- 
bitiousness of our present days into the 
trustfulness of a child's ways and speak 
and feel towards Christ as Father Tabb's 
little Child on Calvary : 

** The cross is tall 

And I too small, 

To reach His hand 

Or touch His feet ; 

But on the sand 
His footprints I have found, 

And it is sweet 
To kiss the holy ground." 



XVI 

THE SELFISHNESS OF SORROW 

The Saviour, who constantly forgot 
Himself for the sake of men, found Him- 
self constantly forgotten by men for 
their own sakes. In the Garden of Geth- 
semane, " when the world was most in 
need of a loyal Master, and when loyalty 
cost an unspeakable price, Christ was 
true. When the Master was most in 
need of friends, and when friendship was 
made easy and almost inevitable by the 
tender solicitations of the divine sufferer, 
the disciples were false." And before 
He came to Gethsemane, while He in His 
sorrow thought upon the sorrows of His 
disciples, they in their sorrow forgot to 
think upon His. " None of you asketh 
me, Whither goest Thou? " he says sadly. 
" But because I have spoken these things 
unto you, sonrow hath filled your heart." 
157 



158 Christ and Life 

Their thought fixed itself upon their own 
immediate loss. They forgot to ask how 
their separation affected Christ. 

The disciples revealed in this the nat- 
ural selfishness of sorrow. We appear 
to mourn for others. Really we are 
mourning for ourselves. What fills our 
thought is the meaning to us of the sep- 
aration between them and us, not its 
meaning to them. A Christian dies. His 
death is a great loss to those who loved 
him, and to the community in which he 
lived. His death is an infinite gain to 
him. He has gone to be with Christ, 
which is far better. From his face the 
Father wipes all tears away. Which con- 
sideration determines the emotions and 
conduct of the man's friends? They 
weep and lament, regretting what has 
taken place, and bewailing it with grief. 
The shades are drawn in the house. 
People pass softly to and fro, and the 
sound of crying is heard. A gloomy 
funeral, moving sadly to the grave, is 
the dark end of all. What a pageantry 
of selfishness! It is a protest against 



The Selfishness of Sorrow 159 

the coronation of a soul, against the 
meeting of a disciple with his Lord. For 
their sakes his friends would have kept a 
child of God from the glorious home to 
which, for his sake, the Father has called 
him lovingly. 

And the same disposition to be selfish 
in our sorrow is displa3^ed in lesser 
things. Some people are scarcely happy 
unless they are unhappy. If they are not 
abused and disliked, they fear they are 
in danger of the woe pronounced upon 
those of whom '' all men shall speak 
well." There is a self-satisfaction, a 
self-praise, which such evil treatment 
enables us to feel, which we cherish 
secretly. But here, too, it is of ourselves 
we are thinking, and not of those who 
thus abuse us. It is right that we should 
sorrow, but it should be with a sad, out- 
reaching sympathy for those who know 
not what they do. The comfortable 
sense of being wronged should give place 
to a yearning love for evil-doers which 
would forget self. 

But sorrow finds it hard to forget self. 



i6o Christ and Life 

The very emotions of sorrow are sweet 
to the selfish heart. And very great 
saints may be among the most selfish of 
men in this. A Httle thought shows how 
large a place they themselves play in 
their sorrow, and how their very sorrow 
supplies a selfish sweetness to them. 
Thus St. Augustine dissects his feelings 
on the death of a friend : " At this grief 
my heart was utterly darkened, and what- 
ever I beheld was death. My native 
country was a torment to me, and my 
father's house a strange unhappiness ; 
and whatever I had shared with him 
for lack of him became a ghastly tor- 
ture. . . . Only tears were sweet to 
me, and took my friend's place in my 
heart's affections. And now. Lord, these 
things are passed by, and time hath as- 
suaged my wound. May I learn from 
Thee . . . why weeping *s pleasant to 
the wretched? . . . Whence, then, is 
sweet fruit gathered from the bitterness 
of life, from groaning, sighing, and com- 
plaining? ... I wept most bitterly 
and found my rest in bitterness. Then 



The Selfishness of Sorrow i6i 

was I wretched, and even that wretched 
life I held dearer than my friend." This 
is self deriving pleasure and relief from 
the contemplation of its wretchedness. 

Something of the same sort may be 
seen constantly in children. A child ob- 
served, and conscious of observance, will 
cry at what, if alone, it will not notice at 
all. In the latter case, so far as anything 
attracts the chiM's notice, it is the act 
itself. In the former, it is the child as the 
subject of the act. The sense of self- 
consciousness gives birth to a sorrow 
that the child in the health of natural- 
ness can not feel. And do not many tears 
shed at funerals spring from the same 
self-consciousness of sorrow ? In heathen 
lands mourners are hired to weep, and, in 
the presence of the company who expect 
it of them, do weep and wail with a sor- 
row as real as much of ours. 

So predominant is the element of self- 
ishness in our sorrow that our very dic- 
tionaries define it as '' distress of mind 
caused by misfortune, injury, loss, disap- 
pointment, or the like ; " " the uneasiness 



i62 Christ and Life 

or pain of mind which is produced by the 
loss of any good, real or supposed." 
Poets sing of it as " remembering hap- 
pier things," and philosophers, like 
Locke, describe it as " uneasiness in the 
mind upon the thought of a good lost 
which might have been enjoyed longer, 
or the sense of a present evil." 

There is a nobler sorrow. The Man of 
Sorrows sorrowed for others, not for 
Himself. He did not grieve at His pains 
for men, but at the sins of men, which 
cursed and blinded them. There was in 
Him no morbid or ascetic gratification at 
pain and loss. He accepted them for the 
sake of men. The sorrows which made 
Him the Man of Sorrows were the sor- 
rows of men which He took upon Him- 
self, — the very consequences of their evil 
and wrong. This was the Messianic 
glory. He was the unselfish sorrower. 

And among men there are sorrows like 
Christ's. He was grieved at the hardness 
of men's hearts. He wondered, in Mr. 
Ruskin's words, not at what men suffered, 
but at what they lost, and He sorrowed 



The Selfishness of Sorrow 163 

for them. When we sorrow for the sin- 
ner who w^ill not be free from his sin, for 
the little child who suffers from pinch ing^ 
hunger and biting cold, for the rich man 
whose greatest need is the consciousness 
of need, for the people who kill their re- 
deemers and know not what they do, for 
the seeking soul repulsed by those to 
whom it comes in its trust, for those who 
can live on the trades and ministries of 
death, — w^henever we sorrow, not because 
of our loss or disappointment, but be- 
cause we feel the loss and disappointment 
of others, we too become men of sorrows 
of the heart and mind of the Man. 

There is a sense in which sorrow may 
be nobty selfish. That is when it works 
nobly for the purification of self, when its 
essence is the recognition of defects and 
shortcomings in self which are displeas- 
ing to God, and must be removed. Such 
godly sorrow, though it spring from what 
is regretful, worketh unto a salvation 
which bringeth no regret. But if sorrow 
is only the distress of mind caused by the 
sense of loss, touched by no redemptive 



164 Christ and Life 

power, no oiitreaching toward reparation, 
it is mean with the littleness and the dete- 
riorating weakness of self. 

Whether the sorrow of men is worthy 
and Christlike is shown by the cures they 
propose for it. When they call it " a kind 
of rust of the soul which every new idea 
contributes, in its passage, to scour 
away," as Dr. Samuel Johnson does, or 
hold, with Publius Syrus, that " patience 
is a remedy for every sorrow," they show 
that they mean by sorrow some selfish 
sense of loss. When men mean by it a 
sad sense of what others are losing, they 
set about its cure, as Jesus did, by bear- 
ing the sorrows of men so as to bear them 
away, and by offering to the lives of men 
what they lack. 

There is ample room in our lives for 
sorrow over our own sins. There is no 
room for sorrow over the dealings of God 
with us. Those dealings are always for 
our good, whatever they take away from 
us or bring to us, and sorrow over them 
is especially unworthy and wrong when 
it is a protest, not only against God's will 



The Selfishness of Sorrow 165 

for us, but also against His loving plan 
for others. When He takes His children 
home, it is all gain and blessing for them. 
The rebellion which finds expression in 
the remonstrance of our grief is selfish- 
ness such as Jesus gently reproved when 
He reminded the disciples that their 
thoughts were wholly of themselves, and 
negligent of Him, as He spoke to them of 
His departure to His Father and their 
Father, to His God and their God. They 
were giving up nothing in comparison 
with the Father's gift when He sent 
forth His Son without sorrow into the 
world, and He who had given this gift 
was able also to comfort their hearts, as 
they would be able to comfort others 
when they had yielded all to Him. 



XVII 
CHRISTIAN ACTIVITY 

" The reason firm, the temperate will, 
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill — ^* 

These were the qualities Wordsworth 
perceived in his perfect woman. They 
are qualities, though not all the qualities, 
which should mark the acts of the Chris- 
tian who would bear his part worthily. 
And perhaps even these lines would be 
improved by transposing the adjectives 
in the first: 

"The reason temperate, the firm will." 

For we are coming back to the true ex- 
altation of the will. Neither the man of 
opinion nor the man of emotion can 
stand before the man of will. They 
will long for that which He will do. They 
i66 



Christian Activity 167 

aspire where he performs. " A wish," 
said South, " is properly the desire of a 
man sitting or lying still — but an act of 
the will is a man of business vigorously 
going about his work." The Christian 
has the business of his Father to be about, 
and is following One who went through 
life doing good, whom the zeal of His 
Father's house ate up, and whose virile, 
beneficent life proclaimed as distinctly as 
His words that He was straitened to work 
the works of Him that had sent Him 
while it was day. It will be His will, 
therefore, to be a man, not of contem- 
plation or of aesthetic taste only, but of 
strong-willed service of God and man. 

This will be one characteristic of the 
true Christian. He will be a worker for 
God. He will not excuse himself from 
spiritual service because he is unfit there- 
for, for if he is unfit for this, he is unfit 
to be alive ; or because he has felt no di- 
vine call thereto, but has been summoned 
only to some secular service, for he is 
unfit for such service if he does not take 
it up in God's fear. 



1 68 Christ and Life 

"... Hymns say right, 
All service ranks the same with God — 
With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
Are we; there is no last or first." 

And, just as the warden of the Broad 
Plain House at Bristol has written, 
" Consider the pathos of the situation: 
' the affliction of the people,' their * cry.* 
And then think of God waiting for the 
sons of men, waiting to use them in the 
service of man. It sometimes seems still 
as if He looks and there is none to help, 
and He wonders that there is none to up- 
hold. Do not let us trouble over our 
want of gifts. It has been found out 
that God is always using the most ordi- 
nary and unlikely means. The work of 
the world is steadily being done by men 
and women whom we should never have 
dreamed of choosing, but whom God 
chooses because He finds them willing 
and ready for His use, humble and in 
the end confident." 

As the Christian man's thought, so also 
will his conduct be modest. The neces- 
sary characteristic of the mightiest serv- 



Christian Activity 169 

ice is gentleness. Nq one hears the thun- 
der of the spheres or the irresistible 
power of the sunbeams. And the true 
Christian will be still and gentle. " A 
man that has done a kindness," says 
Marcus Aurelius, ** never proclaims it, 
but does another as soon as he can, just 
like a vine that bears again the next sea- 
son." It is easy to mar the beauty of 
good- deeds and of a busy life by a con- 
scious satisfaction in it and by such 
speech regarding it as will most effectu- 
ally deprive it of its attractiveness. The 
Christian man will spare himself not at 
all, and will smile at the thought that he 
is not indolent. And he will be so satis- 
fied with the sense of patient obedience 
to the will of God that he will not be 
concerned with the judgment of man, 
though he will hold himself guiltless of 
the offenses of heedlessness. He will 
conduct his life on the principles of the 
late Archbishop Benson: 

" Not to call attention to crowded work or 
petty fatigues or trivial experiences. 



lyo Christ and Life 

To heal wounds which in times past my cruel 
or careless hands have made. 

To seek no favour, no compassion ; to deserve, 
not ask for, tenderness. 

Not to feel any uneasiness when my advice 
or opinion is not asked, or is set aside." 

To teach us something of this the in- 
finite God visibly acted among men in 
the incarnation and called Himself a lamb. 
I have a paper written by a Chinese cap- 
tain, a Christian, on that phrase, " the 
Lamb of God." " Before I became a 
Christian," he writes, *' I was reading one 
day the Gospel of John when my atten- 
tion was arrested by these words. It 
struck me as absolutely inappropriate to 
Hken the Son of God to a lamb. Man 
is always willing and ready to worship 
power, and prefers to bow to the roaring 
lion and cruel tiger, which have contrib- 
uted nothing to his advancement, but, on 
the contrary, filled his heart with awe 
and terror. On the other hand, the ox, 
ass and sheep, to which man owes so 
much of wealth, comfort and civilisation. 



Christian Activity 171 

are made the emblems of simple and un- 
ambitious minds. Not till I became a 
Christian did the light dawn upon my 
soul, and revealed to me with force and 
beauty the depth and richness of meaning 
that is contained in the word lamb, but of 
whose significance I was formerly blind. 
The lamb is meek, gentle, innocent and 
inoffensive. Jesus, the Son of God, the 
lamb of the world, the great sacrifice, 
came not to attract worldly notice and 
applause, came not to create a noise or 
to draw admiration. He came to bear all 
our sins. He came not to strike terror 
into our hearts or to force admittance, 
but to soothe the broken-hearted and free 
the captives. It was with pity, with hu- 
mility, with sorrow for the world and 
love for the sinners that He came, cast- 
ing aside all power and glory, taking upon 
Himself our sins and guilt, bearing the in- 
iquity of the whole human race. He 
came to minister, not to be ministered 
unto." 

The Christian will be possessed by the 



172 Christ and Life 

idea of ministry, of missionary service, 
and the unselfish beneficences of the 
Church will be his care and delight, and 
not less so because he will expect them to 
be administered with all the skill, faith 
and ingenuity which man's mind can 
provide. 

Yet into this unselfish ministry this 
Christian will put all the strength of his 
will, too. To say that he will be of mod- 
est and lowly heart in his acts is not to 
say that he will be feeble and effeminate. 
He will care little for himself, and be 
ready to yield much there, but he will be 
firm as rock in the service of unselfish- 
ness. Nothing is likely to be accom- 
plished there without resolution and ev- 
erything with it. As an old railroad 
president said once to his nephew, Mr. 
Moody's Boston Sunday school teacher, 
Edward Kimball, '' Nothing but Omnipo- 
tence can stand in the w^ay of a deter- 
mined man." And Omnipotence happens 
to be working with the men of whom we 
are thinking. It is for Him that they are 



Christian Activity 173 

living, and having no fear of what man 
can do to them they can not be loosened 
of their resolution, least of all by what 
they know to be valueless and ephemeral. 
The Christian must somehow strike the 
balance, too, between Christian consider- 
ateness and courtesy on one side and out- 
spoken and vertebrate disapproval of 
compromise and contemptible conduct 
and silliness on the other. Life can be- 
come too smooth and human intercourse 
an opiate. And the conventions of an 
artificial life may grow so strong as to 
emasculate character and goggle all hu- 
man vision. The complaisant ways of 
society easily glide into treason to per- 
sonality and into falsehood not less harm- 
ful to moral fibre because mutually un- 
derstood and never admitted to memory. 
Strong and unselfish, the Christian must 
above all be true. He can not go away 
into a desert or a hermit's cell. He must 
live among men, and do his work there, 
and yet be a Christian in his kindliness ; 
not hurl himself against what is mean- 



174 Christ and Life 

ingless, and so destroy his power against 
what is full of meaning from the devil; 
and yet also free from all covenant with 
lies. If some things are difficult and ob- 
scure as he tries to do what is right here, 
some things are easy and plain. The 
Christian will not rent his property for 
saloons and then pray for the widow and 
the fatherless. He will spue the idea gf 
such debauchery out of his mouth. He 
will not say ** yes " when " no " is the 
truth, and he will be as pitiless of the 
error as he is pitiful of the erring. 

How the true Christian will act will 
be a matter, not of expediency or of pub- 
lic opinion, or of the conventions of his 
class, but of principle. And this princi- 
ple will not be the instinct of his moral 
judgment or any prescription of his own 
feelings. It will have heavier sanctions 
than these. There is an objective stand- 
ard of right and wrong above us and un- 
alterable by anything we may think or 
feel. And Christ is this standard. " I 
am the Way," He said. He who has been 



Christian Activity 175 

Lord of a certain portion of our thinking 
must become Lord of the whole, and of 
the whole of our feeling and acting, too. 

The world is already doing what Jesus 
Himself did — calling those people hypo- 
crites and tiars who salute Jesus in the 
temple as Lord, and in the market places 
water stocks, and in the courts corrupt 
justice, and in field and mill oppress the 
laborer and his little child. From all 
this the Christian will come out and sep- 
arate himself and will not fmd any justi- 
fication of his continuance in the evil and 
wrong thereof, in the plea that he can not 
fight against the organisation of society. 
He will find it possible to be a Christian 
in his business, or he will find a way of 
escaping from the business which, while 
it may give him the whole world, costs 
him his own soul. 

Against neglect of life's summons, as 
against the perversion of its opportuni- 
ties, the true Christian will warn his 
heart, believing in the judgment and re- 
calling the truth which flashed once at 



176 Christ and Life 

least across the disordered mind of poor 
James Thompson, condemning himself: 

" The selfish, proud and pitiless, 
All who have falsified life's royal trust: 

The strong whose strength hath basked in idle- 
ness ; 
The great heart given up to worldly lust ; 

The great mind destitute of moral faith ; 

Thou scourgest down to Night and utter Death, 
Or penal spheres of retribution just." 



XVIII 

TO EVERY MAN HIS WORK 

Some time ago one of the religious 
papers printed a review of a book entitled 
" The Leading Idlers of the Gospels." 
At least one person bought the book on 
the strength of that review, and was not 
greatly surprised to find that the proof 
reader had slipped and that the real title 
was *' The Leading Ideas of the Gos- 
pels." The gospel makes no room for 
drones. The Saviour speaks always of 
work. "My meat is to, do the will of 
Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His 
work." " We must work the works of 
Him that sent Me, while it is day: the 
night Cometh, when no man can work." 
" My Father worketh even until now, and 
1 work." And at the end of all He de- 
clares, " I have glorified Thee on the 
177 



lyS Christ and Life 

earth, having accompHshed the work 
which Thou hast given Me to do." 

In this as in other things Jesus is our 
example. We think sometimes that He 
was the one son of man to whom God 
gave a personal and peculiar work. But 
in receiving a work from God to do, 
Jesus' lot was like ours, and not alien 
to the plan of the lives of God's com- 
mon children. One of the great bless- 
ings of His coming lay in His teaching 
that each of us has a work to do also, 
directly chosen for us and assigned by 
our loving Father. " Son," He represents 
the Father as saying to His sons, " Go 
work to-day in the vineyard," and He 
likened the kingdom of heaven to a man 
going into a far country to sojourn who 
had given authority to his servants, and 
to each man his work. 

Oftentimes the personal Christian life 
is supposed to include simply our devo- 
tional habits and the inner spiritual emo- 
tions and movements of our thought. 
But the omission of active work and 
service is fatal. We can not maintain a 



To Every Man His Work 179 

true Christian life just for ourselves. 
God gives us good that we may share it, 
and the act of sharing it both makes it 
ours permanently and expands it richly. 
Our Christian life is intended to be not a 
meditation, but a ministry. 

The work which each Christian is to 
do is not a chance work chosen at ran- 
dom. It is an assignment, a vocation. 
Vocation means calling. That is what 
each Christian's work is intended to be. 
Each one of us has a work to do and 
this work is God's work for us. There 
is great calm and certainty, and there 
is great strength and power in this truth. 
" In the morning," says Marcus Aurelius, 
" when thou art sluggish at rousing 
thee, let this thought be present, I am 
rising to do a man's work." We can 
accept all that comes with perfect peace 
of mind, and we can know that no power 
in the universe can overthrow us or 
make us fail if we find and do God's 
chosen work. And there is nothing nar- 
row in this thought. God does not as- 
sign men alone to what the world re- 



I So Christ and Life 

gards as professional religious work. 
" Every art or work, however unimport- 
ant it may seem," said John Tauler, seven 
hundred years ago, "is a gift of God ; 
and all these gifts are bestowed by the 
Holy Ghost for the profit and welfare of 
man. Let us begin with the lowest. One 
can spin, another can make shoes, and 
some have great aptness for all sorts of 
outward arts. These are all gifts pro- 
ceeding from the Spirit of God. If I 
^vere not a priest, but were living as a 
layman. I should take it as a great favor 
that I knew how to make shoes and 
should try to make them better than any 
one else, and should gladly earn my bread 
by the labor of my hands. There is no 
work so small, no art so mean, but it all 
comes from God, and is a special gift of 
His. Thus let each do that which an- 
other can not do so well, and for love, 
returning gift for gift.'' 

It is restful to think that ever}^ day 
our work is portioned out to us for the 
day. What we call interruptions may 



To Every Man His Work i8i 

be even more God's appointments for the 
day than our carefully prepared projects. 

" Father, I do not ask 
That Thou wilt choose some other task 
And make it mine. I pray 
But this : let every day 
Be molded still 

By Thine own hand; my will 
Be only Thine, however deep 
I have to bend Thy hand to keep. 
Let me not simply do, but be content, 
Sure that the little crosses each are sent, 
And no mistake can ever be 
With Thine own hand to choose for me." 

God will not give any man unworthy 
work. There may be much that is 
routine in it, but this will not obscure 
some divine and living purpose. A trade 
or a profession is good in itself, but God 
means it to serve also a greater end. 
It opens ways for a Christian to human 
hearts and makes it possible for him to 
do that sort of work that abides after 
the world and all that is in it have passed 
away. It is hard to believe, accordingly, 
that God would call any one just to 



1 82 Christ and Life 

make money. Sometimes young men 
are enticed by this temptation, and ex- 
cuse themselves from living work on the 
ground that they will earn money for the 
kingdom of God. The kingdom can get 
along without money, but not without 
life. Jesus called the disciples to be fish- 
ers not of money, but of men, and every 
man now, whatever the occupation by 
which he earns his support, or more than 
his support, must be a winner of souls, a 
shepherd of hearts. 

God is eager to point out to each one of 
us his own peculiar work. Oftentimes 
conscientious Christians trouble them- 
selves with questionings here. " How 
shall we discover the will of God ? " they 
ask. First, we must cease looking for 
some external or magical voice or guid- 
ance. God works in our hearts, not over 
them. It is in us that the Holy Spirit 
says, " Abba, Father," and in the same 
way God guides us within our own 
spirits, so that we can not distinguish His 
guidance from, the motion of our own 
hearts, but submitting ourselves to Him 



To Every Man His Work 183 

may be sure that though He is respect- 
ing the integrity of our own personal- 
ities, He is still working within them. He 
rules the world from within. He will 
probably do the same with our lives. 

Second, as Horace Bushnell says, we 
must exclude certain things that are 
likely to mislead ; the desire to be singu- 
lar, copying the lives of others, complaint 
of surroundings, the wish to know every- 
thing from the outset. 

Thirdly, we must consider the charac- 
ter of God and be sure that God can not 
assign us any work that is not in har- 
mony with this character. Consider our 
relation to God as Creator and Lord. We 
must not do anything that is inconsistent 
with the relationship of proprietorship 
and sovereignty. 

Consider our own moral judgment. It 
may be wrong and allow what God con- 
demns, but we must consider it to dis- 
cover whether it needs amendment. Test 
it by the law and revelation of God in the 
Bible and in Jesus Christ, and consider 
what light this throws upon our path. 



184 Christ and Life 

We should consult our friends. Perhaps 
we will have to disregard their advice, 
perhaps not. Their judgment can never 
be final. They can not bear our responsi- 
bility for us. We have no right to sur- 
render our judgment to them. 

We must consult our best Friend. 
God's providence has been shaping our 
lives. If we are facing the missionary 
problem, who brought us face to face 
with it? Consider the significance of 
that. It makes it impossible for us to 
say that if we ought to go, every one 
ought to go, for every one has not been 
providentially confronted with it. 

Pray, and " when decision and action 
are necessary, go ahead," as Professor 
Drummond used to say. '' You will not 
find out until later, probably much later, 
that you were led at all." For God leads 
His children who will follow even when 
they have no consciousness of being led. 
In this as in other things we walk by 
faith and not by sight. 

This specific work that God gives to 
each one of us is the thing that we are 



To Every Man His Work 185 

to do. Put the emphasis on do. " My 
meat is to do/' said Jesus. The will of 
God for us is to be worked at, not 
merely thought upon. Jesus bids us to 
labour for the meat that endureth unto 
eternal life, and when we have it we 
are to labour in the strength of it. What 
can not a resolute man or woman do in 
his or her own strength ? Think of Helen 
Keller. There is said to be a school 
teacher in Southern Pennsylvania whose 
hands were blown off by a premature 
blast at a stone quarry, when he was a boy. 
To save his Hfe it was necessary to ampu- 
tate both arms near the elbows. While 
recovering he read a book on the lives of 
self-made men, and determined not to 
give up. He went to school and for 
fourteen years now he has been teaching 
successfully. Pie is an excellent penman, 
holding the pen between the ends of his 
arms. He is a good boxer, an accurate 
marksman, pulling the trigger of his gun 
by means of a strap held in his teeth. 
He has been active in politics, and as 
secretary of two local societies has kept 



1 86 Christ and Life 

books which are said to be models of 
neatness. This was what a man accom- 
plished who resolved to do, and if men 
in their own strength can do this, what 
can not a man do in God's strength? 

Life is a trifle in comparison with 
work. ** I hold not my life," says Paul, 
" of any account, as dear unto myself, so 
that I may accomplish my course." 
Jesus willingly gave His life, letting His 
body die for the sake of His work. As 
Samuel Bowles said once, '' The man who 
is not willing to die for his work is not 
fit to live for it.'' This is the real mark 
of greatness, of nobility in men. As 
Huxley wrote to his friend Donnelly, of 
Chinese Gordon's death in the Soudan: 
" Of all the people whom I have met with 
in my life, he and Darwin are the two 
in whom I have found something bigger 
than ordinary humanity — an unequalled 
simplicity and directness of purpose — a 
sublime unselfishness. Horrible as it is 
to us, I imagine that the manner of his 
death was not unwelcome to himself. 
Better wear out than rust out, and better 



To Every Man His Work 187 

break than wear out." A man has no 
right to mar his Hfe, but he has still less 
right to mar his work in order to save 
his life. 

*' What are we set on earth for ? Say, to toil." 

Our Christian life becomes radiant 
with fresh significance when we conceive 
it as an agency of God for the accom- 
plishment of some noble, divinely se- 
lected end, and an end, too, distinctly 
original and personal in the case of each 
of us. We are here to do a specific part 
of God's work for Him. If we do not 
do that we miss the first purpose of our 
life ; we hinder, though we can not frus- 
trate. His plans, and we lose our own 
most splendid privilege of being His fel- 
low workers. Let us not do that. Let 
us work His work, and do it in the Spirit 
of the Christ who was straitened till His 
work was done, and who then could say, 
*' I glorified Thee on the earth, having 
accomplished the work which Thou hast 
given Me to do." 



XIX 

HOW CHRIST RANKS DUTIES 
AND INTERESTS 

In the eyes of the world the place of 
primary importance in a man's life be- 
longs to his interest. In the eyes of 
Christ it belongs to his duty. " Look out 
for number one," the world says, and 
number one is each man's self. But self 
with Christ was number two. He saved 
others. Himself He could not save. He 
pleased not Himself. " Looking out for 
number one " is with men a law of 
selfishness. " Looking out for number 
one " was with Christ a law of service. 
Interest rules men ; duty ruled Christ. 

The deliberate preference of duty to 
interest led Christ to waive His rights. 
He explained to Peter, in connection with 
the temple tax, that He might have de- 
clined payment. " The sons are free," 
i88 



Dudes and Interests 189 

He said, " but — " He waived the right 
to exercise His Hberty. And the Incar- 
nation was in itself a gigantic surrender 
of interest to a divine sense of duty. Hav- 
ing a right to an equaHty with God, Christ 
deemed this right a thing not to be 
jealously retained, but emptied Himself. 
His right to surrender His rights which 
constituted His duty He set above His 
rights which constituted His interest. It 
is this that makes duty more glorious 
than interest. It is the assertion of a 
higher right, — namely, the right to sur- 
render in the interest of others the rights 
which constitute the interest of self. 

And what Jesus set uppermost in His 
own life was set there, not arbitrarily, 
but because of principles which require 
our conformation to the same standard. 
In the lives of all men He claims for 
duties a place above interests. To teach 
men, not rights, but duty, as Mazzini said, 
" was the work of Jesus. He did not 
speak of interest to men whose souls 
were poisoned by the cult of interests. 
. .. . He bent over the decaying world. 



190 Christ and Life 

and murmured in its ear a word of faith. 
To that obscene thing which retained 
nought but the aspect and notions of a 
man, He uttered words unknown up to 
that day, — love, self-sacrifice, celestial 
origin. The dead arose, a new life 
thrilled through that obscene thing which 
philosophy had tried in vain to bring to 
life." Jesus " created for man that theory 
of duty which is the mother of self-sacri- 
fice, which ever was and ever will be the 
inspirer of great and noble things, — a 
sublime theory that draws men near to 
God, borrows from the Divine nature a 
spark of omnipotence, crosses at one leap 
all obstacles, makes the martyr's scaffold 
a ladder to victory, and is as superior to 
the narrow, imperfect theory of rights as 
the law is superior to all of its corolla- 
ries." 

We are familiar with the principle of 
the exaltation of duty over interest un- 
der the terms of the law of self-renunci- 
ation, the abandonment of material in- 
terest for no material return. The mis- 



Duties and Interests 191 

sionary is obeying this law when he leaves 
congenial associations, and a comfortable 
climate and home, to bury himself among 
peoples whose life and surroundings deny 
him any compensation in kind for the 
material interests he has abandoned. But 
though the law of self-sacrifice simply de- 
mands that duty be given its just su- 
premacy over interest, we are accustomed 
to regard it as having a touch of the su- 
pererogatory. It is good, therefore, oc- 
casionally to drop the word out of view, 
and to state its truth in the terms of duty 
and interest. There is no supererogation 
about duty. Sometimes we act as though 
there were. A soldier or a public servant 
does his duty in some conspicuous trial, 
and at once some special reward is pro- 
posed, or some extra remuneration, as 
though what the man did could not natur- 
ally have been expected from him. The 
risk of appearing ungrateful at such 
times is less than the risk of demoralising 
high and stern notions of duty. What 
a man ought to do, he ought to do. He 



192 Christ and Life 

deserves no praise for doing it. He 
would merit condemnation for anything 
else. As Fielding says : 

" When I'm not thank'd at all, I'm thank'd 
enough ; 
I've done my duty, and I've done no more." 

Jesus' view of duty was above all our lax, 
disintegrating sentimentalism. " When 
ye shall have done all the things that are 
commanded you, say, We are unprofitable 
servants ; we have done that which it was 
our duty to do." 

If doing his duty is the least that can be 
expected of a man, how far beneath con- 
tempt is the course of those who exalt 
their interest above their duty ! Some- 
times this interest is purely selfish and 
malevolent, in that it depends on injuring 
others and defeating their interests. In 
such cases, to seek it is diabolical. Some- 
times it is apparently innocent, a man's 
interest not clashing with the contrary 
interest of other men. In such cases, to 
seek it may be only folly, — a man's sur- 



Duties and Interests 193 

render of the best to the mediocre in him- 
self. Evil or innocent, no other principle 
is ever to displace the principle of duty. 
Arnold of Rugby declared the spirit of 
chivalry a hateful and anti-Christian 
thing, because it did this and " fostered 
a sense of honor rather than a sense of 
duty." Sometimes the spirit of love is 
exalted as superior to the sense of duty ; 
but the conflict is forced and unnatural, 
for the spirit of love issues in the spirit 
of duty, and the spirit of duty is evidence 
of the spirit of love. 

The personal life and the national 
policy founded on interest are essentially 
weak. They can not support themselves 
against the sweep of the moral laws of 
God. The peril in the dealings of West- 
ern nations with Asia lies in this. They 
are prone to guide themselves by their 
own interest rather than by their duty 
toward the Eastern people. Chang Chih 
Tung justly complains of such a course, 
and objects to the idea that there can be 
rights without duties. And in each state, 



194 Christ and Life 

church, family, or association, real sta- 
bility and content depend on the su- 
premacy of duty. 

The surrender of interest to duty is the 
very glory and joy of life. This is the 
lesson of Ugo Bassi's sermon: 

*' Measure thy life by loss instead of gain, 
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured 

forth, 
For love's strength standeth in love's sac- 
rifice." 

And this was one of Paley's teachings: 
" No man's spirits ever were hurt by do- 
ing his duty ; on the contrary, one good 
action, one temptation resisted and over- 
come, one sacrifice of desire or interest 
purely for conscience's sake, will prove 
a cordial for weak and low spirits far be- 
yond what either indulgence or diversion 
or company can do for them." That 
man has missed a great joy who has not 
learned to guide his life, not according 
to interests or rights, but according to 
duties, and to rest all his ways and will 
on the impregnable rock, " I ought." And 



Duties and Interests 195 

duty done even without reward is better 
far than interest sought with the success 
of fame or gain. Those are the best days 
in which this is most clearly recognised: 

" When service sweats for duty, not for meed.'* 

Of course, it is the blessed paradox of 
the gospel that our duties are our in- 
terests, and that whoever gives up his in- 
terest for his duty, serves his interest 
in the noblest sense. It is true of the 
Christian, as Bishop Wilkins said, that 
" nothing is properl}" his duty but what 
is really his interest." It is our interest 
to save our lives. But whoever would 
save his life shall lose it. It is our duty 
to lose our lives. And whoever loses his 
life shall find it. We spurn our interest 
and do our duty, and, lo! at the end of 
our duty our interest is awaiting us. We 
spurn our duty and seek our interest, 
and lose both. " Except a grain of wheat 
fall into the earth and die," said Jesus, 
" it abideth by itself alone ; but if it die, 
it beareth much fruit." 



196 Christ and Life 

Our interests are our rights, as men 
view them. But the divine gift of duty 
is in its essence a right transcending 
these rights; the right, namely, to sur- 
render all our lower rights, to scorn our 
interests, to empty ourselves of them as 
our Lord did, and so to win and wear 
through the renunciation of self the 
coronal of Christ, who, though He was 
rich, became poor; though He was the 
Son of the God of all, came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
give His life a ransom for many. 

" I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty, 
I woke, and found that life was Duty. 
Was thy dream, then, a shadowy lie? " 
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly, 
And thou shalt find thy dream to be 
A truth and noonday light to thee." 



XX 

CHRISTIANITY A TRUST 

Two views prevail in the Christian 
Church as to the nature of our gospel. 
Some hold it to be the beneficent gift 
of the generous God. So believing, I 
should say, '' This good gospel is mine. 
With all its ample grace and enfolding 
mercy, it is my own. The attitude of 
others toward it, or their ignorance of 
it, are but secondary and unimportant in 
comparison with its significance to me and 
the pleasing sense of my possession of its 
boundless breadth and blessing." As the 
beginning of a true view of our gospel 
one might pardon this, but perhaps any 
man might be allowed humbly but boldly 
to denounce it as a conclusive judgment. 
For our gospel is less a beneficent gift 
of a generous God than a solemn trust 
197 



198 Christ and Life 

of a just Father whose love is equal and 
whose thought "embraces all. 

Whether one regard Christianity as a 
gift or as a trust, is more than a matter 
of term or of theoretic distinction. It is 
vitally determinative of all conduct and 
character. Viewing the gospel as a gift 
either to the individual believer or to the 
corporate Church is to sow the seed of 
that personal selfishness and proprietary 
exclusiveness of grace of which we have 
already reaped a too lamentable harvest, 
and against which much of the blind so- 
cialistic movement and the irreligious 
groping after brotherhood of our day is 
the pathetic protest. We have passed by 
the time when any true man, desiring to 
be of service to his day, can take this 
Judas attitude of isolation and personal 
selfishness. As an old and powerful 
writer of the Church of England, prophe- 
sying before his time, has said, " Before 
any man can now leave an impress upon 
his age, the unhappiness of his brethren 
must first make him grave." 



Christianity a Trust 199 

Christianity is a trust. The Christian 
is a steward. A dispensation of the 
gospel has been committed to him, and 
it is required of him that he should be 
found faithful. The essence of the gos- 
pel is not a written record or ceremony 
of any sort whatsoever, however holy 
ajid necessary its historical statements 
and forms. The essence of the gospel 
is the reception of a divine trust of truth 
and love and life by a man in behalf of 
his fellow-men. " The Office of Teach- 
ing or Preaching the gospel," says 
Frederick Myers, whom I have quoted, 
*' belongs to men, not to a Book ; to the 
Church emphatically; though not to the 
clergy only, but to every member of it; 
for a dispensation of the gospel is com- 
mitted to every Christian, and woe unto 
him if he preach not the gospel." The 
shame of an eternal dishonor and mal- 
feasance is on the man who views the 
gospel not as a trust but as a personal 
possession. 

Our gospel is as broad as the tender- 



200 Christ and Life 

ness of God. In the wideness of His 
mercy, there is the wideness of the sea. 
As Trench wrote: 

" I say to thee, do thou repeat 
To the first man thou may'st meet, 
In highway, lane, or open street, 
That he and we and all men move 
Under a canopy of love, 
As broad as God's blue heaven above." 

The gift of such love, viewed as a gift 
only, may be sweet. It may more likely 
turn to ashes in the hand, like the apples 
of Lake Asphaltes. But viewed as a 
trust for the blessing of our brethren, the 
reception of such love is the missionary 
summons of the Lowly Person who is 
our King and who left one clear com- 
mand : " Go, share it with others." 

And this is a summons not to clergy 
alone, but to every one of Christ's breth- 
ren. As Myers wrote in his noble 
" Catholic Thoughts on the Church of 
Christ and the Church 'of England": 

" A man that feels himself to have re- 



Christianity a Trust 201 

ceived an unspeakable gift from One who 
permits and commands him to offer the 
Hke to every man he meets, surely he is 
precisely the person who will be most 
zealous to win his brethren to know and 
to love his benefactor. Philosophy was 
not and is not proselytising, because it 
is proud, and because it does not and it 
can not teach men to love : it constitutes 
but a caste, or a school, or a sect; and 
such do not like to be enlarged, for 
thereby the distinction of each of their 
members is diminished. But Christian- 
ity is more than this — it is a society, a 
fellowship, a brotherhood ; and the char- 
ter of its incorporation contains a com- 
mand for its extension ; the very end of 
its existence is the conversion of the 
world to communion with itself. Chris- 
tianity is the world's leaven ; it is a grow- 
ing Light ; it is a diffusive Love ; and each 
member of the Christian Church is called 
to be a herald and a preacher of its faith. 
The love of Christ constrains him; that 
with which he is baptised is as fire, and 



ao2 Christ and Life 

will burn, and burning it will enlighten 
and inflame. A man who has felt the 
blessing of the gospel in his own soul 
can not but be anxious to impart it to his 
brethren. In every Christian heart, be 
assured, Christianity will find a new mis- 
sionary, and, if needs be, a new martyr." 
And may it not be said, without risk 
of misunderstanding, that no true gen- 
tleman can allow himself to be open to 
the suspicion of breach of trust ? In one 
of his journals David Livingstone wrote 
of feeling " much turmoil of spirit in 
view of having all my plans for the wel- 
fare of this great region and teeming 
population knocked on the head by sav- 
ages to-morrow." Then the thought of 
the Saviour's chivalry came to him, and 
he wrote : " But I read that Jesus came 
and said, ' All power is given unto Me, 
in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, 
and teach all nations, and lo, I am with 
you alway, even to the end of the world.' 
It is the word of a gentleman of the most 
sacred and strictest honour, and there's an 



Christianity a Trust 203 

end on't." A gentleman of the most 
sacred and strictest honour was He, and 
His disciples dare not be less. To play 
with a trust as a trivial thing is to cease 
to be the kind of gentleman that He was, 
and to show the sense of honour He 
showed. 

And this trust is a trust for all the men 
of the Master's brotherhood. There are 
vessels of gold and silver in His house, 
but there is no vessel unapKpointed to serv- 
ice, and both the preservation and ex- 
tension of His gospel are dependent upon 
the free discharge of service by all. No 
gifted class can perform a vicarious sacri- 
fice, as no privileged class is endowed 
with exclusive privilege. Each man of 
us has his trust and his work, and per- 
haps neither our Lord nor His Church 
nor His world could endure our dis- 
loyalty. For, once again, as the good 
man I have quoted wrote, " The way in 
which the gospel would seem to be in- 
tended to be alike preserved and perpetu- 
ated on earth is, not by its being jealously 



204 Christ and Life 

guarded by a chosen order and cautiously 
communicated to a precious few, but by 
being so widely scattered and so thickly 
sown that it shall be impossible, from the 
very extent of its spreading merely, to 
be rooted up. It was designed to be not 
as a Perpetual Fire in the temple, to be 
tended with jealous assiduity and to be 
fed only with special oil ; but rather as a 
shining and burning light, to be set up 
on every hill, which should blaze the 
broader and the brighter in the breeze, 
and go on so spreading over the sur- 
rounding territory as that nothing of this 
world should ever be able to extinguish 
or to conceal it." 

When Paul said in his last Epistle, 
when the time of his departure was come, 
" I have kept the faith," he meant that 
he had given it away, that he had viewed 
his acceptance of it not as an endowment 
of personal privilege, but as a holy trust, 
and he besought Timothy that he should 
keep that which was committed to his 
trust in the same way. There is no 
other way in which to keep the trust of 



Christianity a Trust 205 

God. For the trust of God is the duty 
of service. It was thus with Christ, even 
to the bitterness of the cross. And 

" It was well, and Thou hast said in season, 
' As is the Master shall the servant be ' : 
Let me not subtly slide into the treason, 
Seeking an honour which they gave not Thee, 

" Never at even, pillowed on a pleasure, 

Sleep with the wings of aspiration furled; 
Hide the last mite of the forbidden treasure, 
Keep for my joys a world within the world." 



XXI 

OUR FATHER GOD 

One of the most precious services 
rendered by Jesus was His revelation of 
the father heart in God. Of course the 
thought was not unknown during the 
Old Dispensation. *' A father of the 
fatherless," David calls the Lord. 
** Thou art my father," exclaims he or 
another Psalmist. And Israel pillowed 
Its head upon the assurance. 

" Like as a father pitieth his children 
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." 

And God had invited men to speak to Him 
as children. " Ye shall call Me, My Fa- 
ther." Jer. iii. 19. But these ideas of God's 
fatherhood rested upon the old concep- 
tion of the father's place in the family. 
The emphasis was not on tender sym- 
pathy and love, but upon authority and 
206 



Our Father God aoy 

dependence. " O Lord, Thou art our 
Father; we are the clay and Thou our 
Father ; and we all are the work of Thine 
hand." 

But Jesus not only laid bare the truth 
of God's fatherliness, but also revealed 
thus what true fatherhood is, and both 
changed our conception of God and ex- 
alted our notion of fatherhood. He did 
this by opening to us His own inner life 
of relationship to God. He called and 
conceived God as His Father. He laid 
the emphasis not upon God's creative 
power, or His almighty sovereignty over 
human life, although these are just con- 
ceptions of God, but upon His loving 
fatherly relations. " My Father," are 
His words, or simply " Father." This is 
almost the only title of address Jesus 
used. It was never " O infinite One," or 
** O ruler and preserver of all things," or 
" O great and eternal God," but just 
" Father." 

" I thank Thee. Father, Lord of heaven 
and earth that Thou hast hid these things 
from the wise and understanding and 



ao8 Christ and Life 

hast revealed them unto babes." Matt. 
xi:25. 

'* Father, what shall I say? Save Me 
from this hour. But for this cause came 
I unto this hour. Father glorify Thy 
name." John xi : 2y. 

" Father, the hour is come, glorify Thy 
Son, that Thy Son also may glorify 
Thee." John xvii : 5. 

'* O My Father, if it be possible, let this 
cup pass away from Me." Matt, xxvi: 

39- 

" Father, forgive them, for they know 

not what they do." Luke xxiii : 34. 

" Father, into Thy hands I commend 
My spirit." Luke xxiii : 46. 

As might be pointed out in connection 
with Jesus' habits of prayer, it is this very 
intimacy of relationship which adds such 
a spirit of reverence to Jesus' life. Some- 
times He prefixed an adjective — as 
"Holy Father." "Righteous Father," 
but He does not, as we too often do, 
exalt the attribute above the Father. It 
is not so much the justice of the Father 
that is in Jesus' mind as the fatherliness 



Our Father God 1209 

of the justice. It is the person, not the 
quaUty. 

And all Jesus' Hfe and will were sub- 
ject to this dear Father. '' He that sent 
Me is with Me. The Father hath not left 
Me alone, for I do always those things 
that please Him." John viii : 28. The 
very deeds that He did, Jesus said He 
did because He had seen the Father do- 
ing them. " The Son can do nothing of 
Himself but what He seeth the Father 
doing; for what things soever He doeth, 
these the Son also doeth in like manner." 
John V : 19. In our own homes we con- 
stantly see little boys doing what their 
fathers have been doing. Sometimes 
they do these things just because they 
are their fathers, in miniature, and their 
fathers' spirit is in them, and sometimes 
they do them because they have seen their 
fathers do them, and nothing will satisfy 
them until they have done " just as father 
has done." Jesus said that He was His 
Father's own Child in this matter, and 
that He did what He saw His Father 
doing. John viii : 38. But it was also 



2IO Christ and Life 

the Father's own nature in Him repro- 
ducing itself. '* The words that I say 
unto you I speak not from Myself," He 
said, " but the Father abiding in Me, 
doeth His works." John xiv : lo ; viii : 
28. 

This went so far with Jesus that He 
could truly say that His Hfe and His 
Father's were identical, so that the man 
who saw Him saw the Father. John 
xiv : 9. The man who honoured Him 
honoured the Father. John v : 23. The 
man who loved Him loved the Father. 
John viii : 42. '* I and the Father are 
one," He declared. John x : 30. It was 
this that aroused the bitter enmity of the 
Jews. John x:3i. The most precious 
part of Jesus' message, that perfect 
atonement between the Father and His 
children which Jesus came to reveal in 
His life, and to accomplish for us in His 
death, was the thing which men who 
thrust the loving, Fatherly God away 
from them most disliked. It was blas- 
phemy, they said. John x : 33. Jesus' 
stern reply was that the spirit that called 



Our Father God an 

this blasphemj was the very spirit of 
hell, for it antagonised that other spirit 
of sweet trust and companionship which 
is the spirit of the kingdom of heaven. 
Mark iii : 29, 30. 

Now what the Father was to Jesus He 
would be to me. Each one of us may 
joyfully say this. My Father knows my 
needs before I ask Him. " Your Father 
knoweth," said Jesus. Matt, vi : 8. He 
knows because He cares, and He cares 
more than we can care. Do you think 
that the little child lying sick and suffer- 
ing in its mother's arms, tossing wearily, 
suffers as much from its pain as the help- 
less and agonising mother suffers? We 
never suffer as much in our own suffer- 
ings as in the sufferings of those we love. 
They are more to us than we are to our- 
selves. But God is a truer Father and 
a truer friend than we can be. He knows 
and He cares with a solicitude greater 
than we can know. Oh, let us think of 
Him, not as the sovereign God only, but 
as our dear Father. 

And His knowledge leads to ministry 



212 Christ and Life 

as well as sympathy. " If ye then being 
evil know how to give good gifts unto 
your children, how much more shall 
your heavenly Father give good things 
to them that ask Him?" Matt. vii:2. 
How often we have been impatient be- 
cause God seemed to be withholding 
from us some good thing that we de- 
sired! But what God withholds from 
us, while it may be a good thing in itself, 
is not a good thing for us. No one of 
us has ever desired what was truly good 
for us with anything like the eagerness, 
the anxiety, the solicitude with which 
our Father has been striving to give us 
that good thing. 

And the Father has a plan and a will 
for the life of each one of His children. 
Matt. vii:2i; x:29. If this were not 
true, life would be a very insipid thing, 
or a thing exciting only because of its 
lawless peril. But He who alone knows 
enough and cares enough to do it, has 
planned out every human life, desiring 
the noblest things for it, fitting it into the 



Our Father God 213 

richest associations, disciplining it for an 
eternal service of glory. The worst folly 
to be found in the world is the folly of 
scorning the wisdom of the thoughtful 
Father who knows what we are here for, 
and who would make the most of each 
one of His children. 

My Father will keep me in per- 
fect safety. " My Father," said Jesus, 
" which hath given My sheep unto Me is 
greater than all; and no one is able to 
snatch them out of the Father's hand." 
John X : 29. 

" Hidden in the hollow of His blessed hand, 
Never foe can follow, never traitor stand. 
Not a shade of worry, not a touch of care, 
Not a blast of hurry, reach the spirit there." 

Or if some sorrow should come, the 
Father's own protecting hand offers com- 
fort and will wipe away every tear from 
our eyes. Rev. xxi : 4. 

If God is our own Father let us love 
Him more and trust Him more and please 
Him more. " I do always," said Jesus, 



214 Christ and Life 

" those things that please Him." Even 
the perfect God who needs nothing can 
be pleased by His children, or displeased. 
All impatience in your home, every harsh 
or fretful word to little children, each 
prurient thought or wrong desire or un- 
kind judgment are unpleasant to God and 
grieve Him, while He derives real pleas- 
ure from every gentle and loving word, 
every bold stroke at sin, every brave at- 
tempt to suppress what is unclean and 
unworthy in us or in the world. We 
have the encouragement of Jesus in 
thinking of God as truly our Father, — 
to be talked to and consulted with, to 
help and to be helped by, as truly as any 
earthly father. It is wonderful, and it is 
wonderfully good. 

" Thou God of might, 
Infinite wisdom, and unmeasured, matchless 
power,. 
Whose mindful care and all-creative skill 
Can speak a universe to life or clothe a flower, 
Omnipotent, omniscient and all-present, — 
still— 

My Father! 



Our Father God 215 

" Thou God of justice 
Who holdest out the balances of sternest law, 
Who will remember virtues well, nor vice 
forget. 
Who canst not pass the slightest fault or flaw, 
Immutable, austere, and just, — and yet — 
My Father ! 

" Thou God of love, — 
How deeper than the ocean depth and strong 
as death, — 
That gave His only Son a sacrifice for me, 
How tender as a mother's whispering breath, — 
O God of mercy. Thou wilt ever be 
My Father ! 



XXII 

THE HOLY SPIRIT 

Everything done in us or through us 
that pleases God is the work of the Holy- 
Spirit. " No man can say Jesus is 
Lord," says Paul, ''but in the Holy 
Spirit." I Cor. xii : 3. And every time 
we call God Father it is the Holy Spirit 
in us whispering- that dear name. Gal. 
iv : 6. Christians often forget this, and 
sometimes think that they do not know 
the Holy Spirit. The Corinthian Christ- 
ians forgot it. '' Know ye not," Paul 
asks them, " that ye are the temple of 
God and that the Spirit of God dwelleth 
in you?" I Cor. iii: 16. All our quali- 
ties and capacities are gifts of the Holy 
Spirit, whatsoever they may be. I Cor. 
xii: 4-1 1. We are mistaken, therefore, if 
we think that we can be Christians and 
not know the Holy Spirit. 
3:6 



The Holy Spirit 217 

For it is God's Spirit that has quick- 
ened us into life. The least interest in 
the Holy Spirit is evidence that the Holy 
Spirit is at work in us. And if we now 
truly love God and are following His 
Son, it is the Holy Spirit who has 
wrought these things in us. " Except a 
man be bom of water and the Spirit," 
Jesus told Nicodemus, " he can not enter 
into the kingdom of God. That which is 
born of the flesh is flesh, and that which 
is bom of the Spirit is spirit." John iii : 
5, 6. Each one of us who is now alive in 
Christ was made alive by the Holy Spirit. 
We may not have known when He did it 
or have been conscious at all that it was 
He who did it. But neither did we know 
when our physical life began, nor have 
we any consciousness whatever of how it 
came to be. As our physical life sprang 
without our consciousness from other life 
so our spiritual life sprang from God, 
bom of the Holy Spirit. As we look 
back now into that old world we see the 
difference, as wide as between life and 
death and we can thank the good Spirit 



21 8 Christ and Life 

of God for having brought us hither, 
and understand now, that but for Him 
we should never have come over. But 
we did not know that it was He who was 
bringing us. Those who are now com- 
ing or waiting to come do not need to see 
Him or know Him. All they need to do 
is to come over. When they get across 
they will realise who it was that brought 
them. 

As it is the Holy Spirit who brings 
men into the Christian life, so it is He 
who satisfies them there. This was the 
lesson taught to the woman by Jacob's 
well. The Father is seeking for true 
worshippers who will worship Him in 
Spirit, for He is a Spirit, and in such 
worshippers a well of living water will 
be opened, springing up unto eternal life. 
John iv : 14, 23. And more than this, out 
of the very depths of the lives of such 
men the Holy Spirit will pour streams of 
living water to bless and enrich others. 
John vii : 37-39. But here once again 
the Holy Spirit may do His work without 
recognition. Every word spoken for 



The Holy Spirit 219 

Jesus, every truly loving act the Holy 
Spirit prompts, and conceals Himself be- 
hind the good work He has done. He 
obeys more perfectly than any one else in 
the universe Jesus' commands, *' Let your 
light so shine before men that they may 
see your good works and glorify your 
Father which is in heaven." Matt, v : 6. 
We can see this unique characteristic 
of the Holy Spirit, His complete self- 
effacement, in Jesus' words about Him. 
'' The Holy Spirit," He told His disci- 
ples, " whom the Father will send in My 
name, He shall teach you all things and 
bring to your remembrance all that I said 
unto you. . . . He shall bear witness 
of Me. ... He shall not speak from 
Himself; but what things soever He 
shall hear, these shall He speak. . . . 
He shall glorify Me ; for He shall take of 
Mine and shall declare it unto you." John 
xiv:26; xv:26; xvi:i3, 14. The Holy 
Spirit is not here to exalt Himself, to im- 
press Himself upon our consciousness 
and experience. He is here to fix oui at- 
tention and gaze not upon Himself but 



220 Christ and Life 

upon the words and the face of Christ, 
and to impress Christ upon us and make 
us like Him. The evidence of His pres- 
ence, therefore, is not disordered and thau- 
maturgical commotions in us, strange, 
unintelligible impulses, unreasoned ca- 
prices and moods, but a noble love of 
Jesus, a memory quick to recall what 
Jesus said, an imagination before which 
Jesus lives again, a deep longing to be 
like Him, and in due time a still and 
transforming sense of His companion- 
ship. 

The Holy Spirit is not unreal because 
we do not see Him and because He hides 
Himself behind Christ. A friend asks 
me to do a hard service. I do it. Why? 
What was it that led to the doing of the 
hard thing? Was it the spoken request, 
the undulation of the atmosphere between 
us by which the sound from his lips came 
to my ear? Not at all. It was my 
friend's influence within my will. The 
sound did not do it. My friend did it in 
me. If I had known he wanted it done 
it would have been done without any 



The Holy Spirit 221 

verbal request. It is intangible influence 
that moulds us even among friends. Well, 
wipe out the limitations imposed by the 
material world and it is not impossible to 
understand how the Holy Spirit does 
what He does with us. And just as I did 
what my friend wanted done, and yet not 
I but he in me, so I do what the Holy 
Spirit wants done, and yet not I but He 
in me. We do not need to worry our- 
selves about Him, with questions as to 
our relation to Him, such as, Have I been 
baptized with the Spirit? Have I been 
filled with the Spirit ? What we need to 
do is to look steadfastly upon the face of 
Christ and do His will, and in proportion 
as we see His face clearly and do His will 
sincerely and completely we may know 
that the Holy Spirit is filling us and gain- 
ing true sovereignty over our lives. 

In the New Testament much is said 
justifying the assertion of the inseparable 
relationship between the Holy Spirit and 
Christ. John suggests it significantly in 
his comment on Jesus' words on the last 
day of the Feast of the Tabernacles. 



222 Christ and Life 

" This spoke He," remarks John, " of the 
Spirit which they that believed on Him 
were to receive: for the Spirit was not 
yet given; because Jesus was not yet 
glorified." John vii : 39. Both these 
things are true: as Jesus is glorified the 
Holy Spirit comes; as the Holy Spirit 
comes Jesus is glorified. If Jesus went 
away as He said He did, that the Spirit 
might come (John xvi:7) the Spirit 
has come that Jesus may not be away 
from us, but so near us as to be in us and 
reigning over us. We do wrong if we 
divorce the mystery of the Holy Spirit 
from the historic life and the present per- 
sonality of Christ. 

The life in which the Holy Spirit is 
working will be a life of purity and of 
freedom. The union which He estab- 
lishes between Christ and us is a union 
of spirit (I Cor. vii: 17), making impossi- 
ble to us whatever is impossible to Christ. 
He begets in us His own mind, and the 
life and peace resident in it (Rom. viii : 6) 
and produces when the full time of fruit- 
age has come His own characteristic re- 



The Holy Spirit (223 

suits. Gal. V : 22, 23. Chains that no 
one else can break He breaks and creates 
for us a real liberty. II Cor. iii: 17. It 
is the Holy Spirit, in a word, who realises 
for us and in us the whole loving purpose 
of God, and who bids us in return to look 
on the sweet face of Christ and thank 
Him, and asks only to be given free 
course in us to do yet more and greater 
things for us. 

The thought of the love of Christ is 
familiar to us. We scarcely ever think 
of the love of the Holy Spirit, and yet 
Christ's is the only love that can equal it. 
" Greater love hath no man than this," 
He said, " that a man should lay down 
his life for his friends." But what shall 
we say of a laying down of life for 
friends that is also a laying down of life 
in friends? For the Spirit of God in 
working for us must work in us, — down 
among the unsightly ideals, the evil im- 
aginings, the sinful desires, the debased 
tastes. There in the dark and death and 
disease of the soul the pure and Holy 
Spirit must go to live with what it ab- 



224 Christ and Life 

hors, to struggle with it in the night, to 
wage relentless and unresting war 
against all that exalts itself against God 
and the divine destinies of man. This is 
not one great sacrifice after which all is 
over. It is a perpetual service, a per- 
petual sacrifice. As we think of what 
He is doing in us let us cease to grieve 
and resist Him. For the Spirit of God, 
make room, make room. 



XXIII 
PAST AND FUTURE 

The intimation of immortality is in our 
restless reluctance to let the past and the 
future alone. What have we to do with 
them? We can not call back one mo- 
ment from the past or hasten by the frac- 
tion of a second the coming days. And 
yet we live most of our life in one or the 
other, and refuse to accept confinement to 
the moment that is present with us. There 
is in us an undefined sense of supremacy 
over time, a consciousness of eternal in- 
terest. What was and what will be we 
feel are alike ours. 

And in every Christian heart this feel- 
ing is a right feeling. The past is ours. 
It holds for us the record of the earthly 
life of Christ and the salvation that He 
wrought out for men. That would be 
225 



0.26 Christ and Life 

enough to redeem the past. The time in 
which Christ came, which gave Him room 
for His words and ways has a right to 
Hve in our hearts. And the past holds 
the evidences of God's unfailing love. It 
is itself the evidence of His fatherly edu- 
cation of mankind. Ten thousand noble 
acts of sacrifice, the birth of friendships, 
moral victories, great expansions of 
strength and vision — the past is full of 
these things. The very gift of memory is 
proof that God means us to recall what is 
gone. He enjoined upon Israel the recital 
of His great works from generation to 
generation, and He established institu- 
tions to be the perpetual memorial of His 
goodness. If we are not to live in the 
past, the past is yet to live on with us. 

" The thought of our past years in me doth 
breed 
Perpetual benediction." 

But there are things in the past which 
we do not want to have live on with us. 
If it holds the records of our victories, it 



Past and Future 227 

holds also the records of our defeats. Our 
sins were in it and it is dark with failure. 
And we have no right to keep these and 
carry them on with us into the future. 
These were the things behind that Paul 
forgot. And we have our own duty of 
forgetfulness, too. " Thou shalt forget 
the shame of thy youth/' says the prophet. 
Isa. liv : 4. And God promises that He 
too, will forget, and remember our sins no 
more. Jer. xxxi : 34. Let us let these 
things go. They have served their pur- 
pose if they have thrown us more trust- 
fully upon the strength that alone can 
guard us henceforth from stumbling. If 
they have done that let them and the time 
that holds them go. 

" My soul is sailing through the sea, 
But the Past is heavy and hindereth me. 
The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells 
That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells 

About my soul. 
The huge waves wash, the high waves roll 
Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole 
And hindereth me from sailing! 



228 Christ and Life 

" Old Past let go, and drop i' the sea 
Till fathomless waters cover thee! 
For I am living but thou art dead; 
Thou drawest back, I strive ahead 

The Day to find. 
Thy shells unbind ! Night comes behind, 
I needs must hurry with the wind, 
And trim me best for sailing." 

There are some, however, who are 
more fearful about the future than about 
the past. They long for " the good old 
times " and lament each departure from 
ancient ways. Their golden age is behind 
them, and the shadows fall darkly across 
the forward days. But this is slavery, 
and we are free. The Spirit of the good 
God came to deliver us from this as well 
as other bondage. The '' things to come " 
are ours. I Cor. iii: 22. Wherever in 
space or in time we are borne we have 
nothing to fear. 

" I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air, 
I only know I can not drift 
Beyond His love and care." 



Past and Future 229 

The rapid changes that are passing 
over the world, shaking the old things 
until we know not what is established, 
can not shake the truth that the Lord God 
holds all changes in His hand and that 
they are to Him but little things. Chris- 
tians, above all young Christians, should 
not be timid. They should leap with ex- 
hilaration of life into the movements by 
which the present Spirit of the living 
God is preparing better things for the 
world. 

And we may believe this of our own 
lives as truly as of the world. The future 
holds nothing dreadful for us. We may 
face it with a sunny smile and smile on 
still even when the play of life becomes 
stern and severe and we feel like the 
grape no longer flush and full on the vine 
in the sun but crushed in the wine press. 
It is for good. Or 

" Note that Potter's wheel, 
That metaphor! 



230 Christ and Life 

" What though the earlier grooves 
Which ran the laughing loves 
Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 
What though, about thy rim, 
Scull-things in order grim 
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner 
stress? 

" Look not thou down — but up ! 
To uses of a cup, 
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's 
peal. 
The new wine's foaming flow. 
The Master's lips aglow ! 
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needs't 
thou with earth's wheel ? " 

And even death is a trifle. We may 
not wish to put it as Swift did, that " it is 
impossible that anything so natural, so 
necessary, and so universal as death 
should ever have been designed as an evil 
to mankind," but we can say that all the 
evil of death has been abolished for us by 
Jesus Christ our Lord and that we have 
not the slightest fear of it. Just beyond 
it Christ is waiting for us. 

And some day a generation will come 
which Christ will meet this side of death. 



Past and Future 23 1 

We have a right to watch for Him as 
though that generation were our own. 
That is the best thing about the future: 
Christ will come in it, even as the best 
thing about the past is that in it Christ 
came. Our Christian lives are incomplete 
if they lack this hope of Christ's return, 
*' the blessed hope and appearing of the 
glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus 
Christ." Titus ii: 13. The early Chris- 
tians found in it incentive to holiness, to 
purity, to diligence, to soberness, to ac- 
tivity and with it they comforted their 
hearts. What it was to them it can be to 
us. " Be ye also ready, for in an hour 
that ye think not, the Son of Man 
Cometh." Matt, xxiv : z^4. '' And now 
little children abide in Him that if He 
shall be manifested, we may have bold- 
ness and not be ashamed before Him at 
His coming." I John ii : 28. 

And that is the best way to prepare for 
the future and also to crown the past, 
namely, to live right in the present. " If 
we examine our thoughts," says Pascal, 
*' we shall find them always occupied 



1^2 Christ and Life 

with the past or the future. We scarcely 
think of the present, and if we do so, it 
is only that we may borrow light from it 
to direct the future. The present is never 
our end; the past and present are our 
means, the future alone is our end. Thus 
we never live but hope to live." But we 
never shall live if we do not live. Those 
are ready to meet the Lord when He 
comes who are watching before He comes 
and they go in to His marriage supper. 

Is my lamp now trimmed and filled 
with oil and are my loins now girt ? Am 
I now like unto a man who is waiting for 
his Lord? If I would live with Christ in 
the life that is to be, Christ must live with 
me in the life that now is. If I would 
" appear with Him in glory " I must be 
able to describe Him here as Paul did, 
" Christ my life." Col. iii : 14. If for 
me to die is to be gain, then to me to live 
must be Christ. Phil, i : 21. 



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